The level of compensation and the extent of pay-for-performance for chief executive officers (CEOs) has been a topic of considerable controversy in the academic and business communities. Critics of CEO compensation practices argue that because the board of directors is influenced by the CEO, the board does not structure the CEO's compensation package to maximize value for outside shareholders. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there is an association between the level of CEO compensation and the quality of firms' corporate governance, and whether firms with weaker governance structures have poorer future performance.
We find that both board-of-director characteristics and ownership structure have a substantive cross-sectional association with the level of CEO compensation, after controlling for standard economic determinants of the level of CEO compensation (e.g., proxies for the firm's demand for a high-quality CEO, contemporaneous firm performance, and firm risk). In particular, with respect to the board-of-director variables, we find that CEO compensation is higher when the CEO is also the board chair, the board is larger, there is a greater percentage of the board composed of outside directors, and the outside directors are appointed by the CEO or are considered `gray' directors. CEO compensation is also higher when outside directors are older and serve on more than three other boards. With respect to ownership variables, we find that CEO compensation is a decreasing function of the CEO's ownership stake and the existence of an external blockholder who owns at least 5% of the equity. Although we find no association between the percentage ownership per outside director and CEO compensation, we find that the existence of a non-CEO internal board member who owns at least 5% of the shares is associated with lower CEO compensation.
Given these results, the variation in pay explained by the board and ownership structure variables represents either: (1) an indication that we inadequately specified a model for the equilibrium wage of the CEO (exclusive of the board and ownership structure variables), or (2) an outcome due to the existence of unresolved agency problems. In order to distinguish between these alternative explanations, we examine whether the predicted component of compensation arising from the board and ownership structure variables is correlated with future period firm operating and STOCK MARKETperformance. We find consistent evidence of a negative relation between the compensation predicted by the board and ownership structure variables and subsequent performance. This finding suggests that the weightings of the board and ownership variables in the compensation equation are related to the effectiveness of the firm's governance structure, rather than these variables proxying for the determinants of the CEO's equilibrium wage. As such, our results suggest that firms with weaker governance structures have greater agency problems; that CEOs at firms with greater agency problems extract greater compensation; and that firms with greater agency problems perform worse.
The remainder of this paper is organized into six sections. In Section 2, we review the prior empirical literature on board and ownership structure, CEO compensation, and firm performance. The sample is described and variables are defined in Section 3. In Section 4, we document the association between the level of compensation and the board and ownership structure variables. The association between subsequent performance and the predicted component of compensation arising from the board and ownership structure is presented in Section 5. Section 6contains sensitivity tests to determine the robustness of the results to alternative specifications. A summary and conclusion is provided in Section 7.