As shown above, many researchers find that there is an asymmetric
impact of executive compensation on firm performance, and provide
various possible explanations for this. Essentially, they use different
data segmentation methods to identify the factors that could influence
the incentive effect in stock-based compensation. However, in general,
these segmentations are arbitrary and exogenous, and normally they
would change the original distribution of the full sample, which might
invalidate the statistical tests. The QR method is one way to alleviate
these problems, and thus we apply it to test the relationship between
stock-based compensation and firm performance.