Executive Compensation and Securitization: The Missing Link
44 Pages Posted: 18 Jan 2012 Last revised: 15 Jan 2016
Date Written: January 17, 2012
Abstract
We assess the effect that asset securitization has on executive compensation. Securitization is the process whereby firms “sell” financial assets in transactions that bear many economic characteristics of a loan. Scholars and policy makers have expressed concern about the agency costs associated with such transactions, including that they create opportunities for managers to loot companies that engage in them.
We focus on non-financial-services firms, and construct a dataset of over 15,000 firm-year observations, comparing the CEO pay of securitizing firms (1,051) to those that do not (14,301). Panel OLS fixed-effects regressions, year-on-year change regressions, matched sampling and sub-sampling analyses show that securitizers do not, in fact, pay more than non-securitizers. This, in turn, suggests that whatever its other strengths or weaknesses, securitization by non-financial-services firms is unlikely to lead to agency costs hypothesized in the literature.
Keywords: executive compensation, asset securitization, agency costs, empirical analysis
JEL Classification: G14, G32, G35, J33, K12, K22
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation