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We document three new facts about gender differences in executive compensation. First, female executives receive lower share of incentive pay in total compensation relative to males. This difference accounts for 93% of the gender gap in total pay. Second, the compensation of female executives displays lower pay-performance sensitivity. A $1 million dollar increase in firm value generates a $17,150 increase in firm-specific wealth for male executives and a $1,670 increase for females. Third, female executives are more exposed to bad firm performance and less exposed to good firm performance relative to male executives. We find no link between firm performance and the gender of top executives. We discuss evidence on differences in preferences and the cost of managerial effort by gender and examine the resulting predictions for the structure of compensation. We consider two paradigms for the pay-setting process, the efficient contracting model and the “managerial power” or skimming view. The efficient contracting model can explain the first two facts. Only the skimming view is consistent with the third fact. This suggests that the gender differentials in executive compensation may be inefficient.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between institutional investor ownership and the compensation of executives at US banks during the financial crisis period.

This paper uses a linear regression model to examine the association between institutional ownership and the level of executive compensation at US banks.

Institutional investors influence executive compensation at banks with the impact being most pronounced for the CEO. Ownership by the top five investors is associated with greater total compensation. Active investors have the strongest impact on executive compensation as evidenced by a positive association between active ownership and both equity compensation and total compensation. As well, active ownership is negatively associated with bonus compensation. The paper also finds that passive and grey investors influence compensation but to a less significant extent than active investors.

The results suggest that the monitoring role of active and passive institutional investors is different in the banking industry. As well, institutional investors were likely a driving factor in shaping the compensation packages of the top executive team during the financial crisis period.

Stakeholders at banks should be aware that not all types of institutional investors act as effective monitors over issues such as controlling the amount of executive compensation paid to the highest paid executive, the CEO. Prospective investors should consider the type of institutional investor that owns large blocks of equity when making an investment decision. Namely, the interests of existing institutional investors may differ from their own interests.

This paper provides a new perspective on the monitoring roles played by different types of institutional investors. Furthermore, it provides a more comprehensive analysis by investigating the role of institutional investors in shaping the compensation packages of CEOs and other top executives including chief financial officers (CFOs) who play a vital role in risk management at banks.

This study aims to analyse the gender pay gap among CEOs, VPs and potential top executives. The authors seek to analyse how much of the gap is explained by differences in individual characteristics and how much is explained by firm characteristics and discriminatory processes.

The paper estimates compensation functions based on a panel of employer‐employee data set covering all Danish companies in the private sector with more than 50 employees during the period 1996‐2005.

The authors document that when controlling for a large number of observable characteristics and time‐invariant characteristics, there still exists a large gender compensation gap among top executives in Denmark. For VP and potential top executives, the estimated gap increased during the period 1996‐2005 while for the small and selected group of CEOs, the corrected gender gap decreased slightly.

The study does not claim to identify causal links between top executive compensation and individual or firm specific background characteristics.

The extension of the family‐friendly schemes may have had negative boomerang effects on the compensation and careers of all women, irrespective of whether they become mothers or not. Especially for those women aiming to reach the top of the organisation, these effects may be important because potential career interruptions are expected to be more severe for this group.

This study adds to the limited empirical literature on the gender pay gap among the narrow group of top executives using a large panel employer‐employee data set of all Danish companies.

To provide insights into the experience of women aspiring to the CEO position, particularly regarding qualifications and compensation expectations.

The ExecuComp database of executives at 1,500 large US corporations from 1992 to 2004 was used to identify women CEOs and to examine gender differences in compensation of executives over that period. Additional information about the backgrounds of female CEOs was collected from company press releases and regulatory filings.

Women are not as highly compensated as men before becoming CEO but the few who reach the CEO position receive similar compensation as men. While women CEOs are younger on average than men, they have impressive work experience and education.

The study covers relatively large US companies that are publicly traded; thus, smaller firms and privately‐held firms are not included.

Impressive work experience, usually from within the company, and a strong education seem to be associated with promotion to the CEO position. Female executives should be more aware of the existence of gender differences in compensation at positions other than the CEO.

Much is written about the gender‐based duality of the leadership career and the overall gender gap in compensation. This study adds an in‐depth analysis of compensation at the top of the executive ladder to better understand who makes it to the top and whether they are equitably rewarded.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate how top executives’ compensation is associated with environmental performance in the Chinese context and how this association varies with differing levels of industrial competition.

Combining agency and institutional theories, the empirical study is based on a sample of 698 publicly listed firms in China’s manufacturing sector.

The authors find that top executives’ cash pay has a positive association, and equity ownership a negative association, with corporate environmental performance. Furthermore, in more competitive industries, both pay and ownership are more strongly associated with environmental performance, indicating that industrial competition plays a moderating role in these relationships.

The findings imply that different incentive schemes can motivate executives toward environmental management in the Chinese context in opposite directions. They highlight the importance of improving regulation in order to motivate firms to engage in further environmental management.

Previous work on the relationship between executives’ compensation and socially responsible activities has mainly focussed on developed countries. This study is set in an emerging economy, and identifies new evidence to show that the effect of executive incentives is institutionally specific. In addition, it explores the effect of industrial competition on executives’ incentives to engage in environmental management, suggesting an explanation for the contradictory evidence found in previous research.

Kato & Long state that executive compensation has attracted much attention from economists in the past two decades yet most academic work on executive compensation has been concentrated on a few developed countries such as the USA and the UK, mainly due to data availability. In light of the mounting interest in the vital role that corporate governance may play in economic development, however, it is of considerable importance to study how firms in developing countries compensate their top executives. In particular, for transition economies struggling to transform their state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) into profitable modern firms through various reform measures, the provision of efficient managerial incentives is a crucial ingredient of the successful transition of the economy. Since executive pay‐performance link represents the bulk of managerial incentives for top management, a closer look at the nature of pay‐performance link for top management in transitional economies will provide much needed information for the evaluation of the current reform effort and the designing of future reform measures. This paper seeks to address these issues.

A review of available literature for this topic was sourced, collated and summarised.

The significant pay‐performance link for top management in China's listed firms is overall encouraging news for current policy makers in China, who consider public listing in the stock market as a key mechanism of achieving such a goal for large SOEs. However, not all news is good. Perhaps most importantly, they have found that government ownership of China's listed firms is weakening pay‐performance link for top managers and thus possibly making China's listed firms less effective in solving the agency problem.

Taken in context with other literature and research, this paper provides an insight into the link between Chinese state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) and other publicly listed firms and executive remuneration.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether regulatory restriction on executive compensation in Chinese state-owned enterprises is beneficial to firm performance. The authors also examine the role of monitoring mechanisms in offsetting the effect of compensation restriction.

Multivariate analysis is conducted using archival data from Chinese listed companies over the period of 2007-2014.

The findings show that the restriction on executive compensation is negatively associated with a firm’s accounting performance, and this negative effect is ameliorated in firms with good internal control and a high level of institutional shareholding. Additional analysis reveals that the negative effect of pay restriction on firm performance is more pronounced in central government-controlled listed SOEs than in those controlled by local government.

This study is the first to investigate a government’s say-on-pay policy. Specifically, the findings pinpoint the inefficacy of regulatory intervention in corporate executive compensation. The findings add to compensation literature using China’s unique institutional setting.

This article discusses the pay packages of executive officers at internetrelated business. Generally, the executives’ total compensation include salary, bonuses, commissions, stock options, and other financial compensation, such as forgiveness of loans, automobile expenses, etc. The 70 to 80 percent of the CEOs’ compensations are from gains of exercising stocks. In this tumbling market, shareholders are suffering the loss from the declining stock prices. However, many CEOs are still left with a mountain of wealth. Meanwhile, the board of directors also raises the stock options to retain their top talents even to those who are under‐performing. Besides CEOs’ compensations, we will also compare the CEO pay with non‐CEO pay packages. The CEOs compensations are still the highest. Furthermore, the average CEO made 42 times the average hourly worker’s pay in 1980, 85 times in 1990, and a staggering 531 times in 2000. Many shareholders are against these out of control pay packages. We conclude that it is time to review the process of determining the CEOs compensation, and that the significant presence of pay‐by‐performance should be taken into account in any examination of the practice and regulation of corporate governance.

The purpose of this article is to examine if certain board characteristics have an impact on the total remuneration of top management and the ratio of stock-based remuneration to total top-management remuneration.

The study draws on data from the largest public Canadian companies, the constituents of the TSX/60 index. The study controls for firm size and profitability.

The authors concludes that total remuneration of top management is directly linked to board-member total remuneration and the board average number of director-tenure years. The study also shows that the ratio of stock-based to total top-management remuneration is positively affected by the percentage of independent directors, total remuneration of board directors, the ratio of stock-based remuneration of directors to their total remuneration and the average number of tenure years of the board of directors.

If regulators are determined to curb the excesses in top-management remuneration by means of promoting boards with certain characteristics, they should implement measures facilitating the control of directors’ remuneration and tenure, to discourage cronyistic behavior. Good corporate governance requires that the board act as a counterbalance to top management, ensuring that a substantial percentage of top-executive total compensation is variable, and not fixed. According to our findings, the boards that are the most likely to hold managerial avoidance of variable pay in check are those favoring director independence, variable director remuneration and longer director tenures.

The present article examines specifically the latter aspect, namely, the role of board characteristics (independence, size, compensation, board director ownership and tenure, etc.) in the determination of top-management compensation. This relationship is important because it allows us to further the analysis of corporate governance. If the above-mentioned traits of boards have a meaningful relationship with the compensation of the top management, one might conclude that certain practices in the composition of boards could influence good corporate governance practices. This is relevant for regulatory agencies, for investors and for corporations.

The article adds to the extant literature in a number of ways. Firstly, it considers the role of the traits of the board in the determination of the compensation of the top-management teams, and not only of the chief executive officer, as is the focus of previous literature. Secondly, the article focuses on the power interplay between boards and managers, and, more particularly, on the ability of boards to be an effective mechanism of corporate governance. Finally, the article examines the potential impact of board traits in the determination of top-management compensation in the context of Canadian firms, a subject that has received less attention from academic research, which has mostly concentrated on analyzing the issue in the US context.

This paper analyzes the links among executive compensation, a firm’s strategic orientation, and firm performance. A number of key questions relative to the relationships among these elements remain unanswered because prior research on this subject has reported mixed results, and, moreover, has been confined almost exclusively to U.S. firms. We develop a framework that draws on arguments from agency theory to identify such links. A research design with both archival and survey data is used to test hypotheses in a sample of 253 Spanish companies. We found that top managers’ compensation systems are linked with a firm’s strategic orientations, but in a different form than that of previous studies. Results show two differentiated groups of firms: (1) prospective firms that adapt their managerial compensation systems to the requirements of strategic context, consequently obtaining positive performance effects; and (2) conservative firms that design managerial compensation systems independent of strategic context, consequently not obtaining additional performance benefits.