Does Executive Compensation Reflect Corporate Productivity?

Abstract

Recent literature has given attention to the effect of CEO‐specific productivity on the structure of CEO compensation. Our paper instead focuses on the effect of a different productivity factor—which we call “corporate productivity”—on CEO compensation. In particular, we show that corporate productivity affects the trade‐off between incentive and risk in a non‐monotonic fashion, which the literature has not yet recognized. Using various empirical proxies for corporate productivity, we show that our results are consistent with the non‐monotonic relation and thus contribute to the debates in the incentive‐risk trade‐off literature. Second, our findings also contribute to the internal capital market literature by exploring the relation between the structure of CEO compensation and excess value.

Keywords: CEO compensation, corporate productivity, excess value, incentive‐risk trade‐offs

JEL Classification: G30, G32, J33