高管薪酬结构、所有权与公司经营绩效.doc

Executive compensation structure, ownership, and firm performance Introduction Despite widespread public attention and a surge in research interest, the relationships among executive compensation structure, ownership structure and control, and firm performance are still little understood. For example, Jensen and Murphy (1990a) suggest that equity-based rather than cash compensation gives managers the correct incentive to maximize firm value, but there is little empirical evidence on whether corporations whose executive compensation is more equity-based actually perform better. Little is known, either, about whether the ownership of the company’s stock by insiders versus outsiders or the composition of the board of directors affects executive compensation structure. This study presents empirical evidence on the relationship between the structure of executive compensation and firm performance. It is exploratory in that executive compensation, ownership structure, and board composition are ultimately part of a simultaneous system that determines the corporation’s value and the allocation of that value among various claimants. As a result, the associations reported here are not necessarily causal ones. Nevertheless, empirical regularities in the structure of executive compensation should help guide future research. This study differs from previous work on compensation in two ways. First, it focuses on the structure rather than the level of compensation. Second, it investigates executive compensation in the context of the firm’s ownership structure and the composition of its board of directors. I use 197991980 compensation data for 153 randomly-selected manufacturing firms. An important feature of the sample is that it focuses on small as well as large firms, thus providing the variation necessary to conduct statistical tests. In addition, the sample is constructed separately for CEOs, for top executives, as well as for all officers and directors as a group.