If institutional investors influence their portfolio firms’ executive pay practices through
investing and trading decisions, the differences across the three types of institutional investors
in terms of investment horizon likely influence the firms’ choice of performance measures in
determining cash compensation (e.g., salary plus bonus). Specifically, I hypothesize that to the
extent that institutions with a long investment horizon hold more shares, the board is likely to incorporate more long-term and forward-looking performance measures (e.g., stock returns) in
determining CEO cash compensation. Since the information set reflected in prices contains
information about future earnings changes (i.e., prices lead earnings), change in stock price is
a more forward-looking measure than accounting earnings that incorporates the information
reflected in price changes with a lag (e.g., potential benefits from R&D spending in year t will
be reflected in current stock returns since it provides information on a firm’s future cash
generating-ability, but not reflected in contemporaneous earnings). Thus, long-term focused
investors such as dedicated investors or quasi-indexers are likely to exhibit a preference for
evaluating and rewarding CEOs based on forward-looking stock returns rather than backward looking
accounting earnings (Dikolli et al. 2004).