This study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, unlike the previous literature on executive compensation
that focuses on independent companies, we study executive compensation under the circumstances
of business groups, which conforms more with the current situation of the capital markets in Asian countries,
especially in China, and avoids the bias in the existing literature while providing a new angle to study executive
compensation. Second, the current literature of business groups provides limited insights on the governance
inside business groups. To our best knowledge, our paper is the first to study the incentive mechanism in business
groups empirically, which also contributes to the literature on business groups. Third, the paucity of RPE
in the components of executive compensation remains a puzzle (Murphy, 1999) and is not well understood in
the literature. We provide a better research design to test RPE in executive compensation. By examining the
RPE mechanism in business groups, we can control for the influence of the characteristics of the ultimate shareholder and obtain more conservative and reliable results, which sheds more light on the puzzle of RPE.