As discussed in the institutional background section, China’s listed companies are only required to disclose certain compensation information in their annual reports based on the disclosure guidance published by the CSRC. Although the regulations require information such as the form and amount of executive compensation, they do not require the disclosure of the details of executive compensation contracts. We hand-collected 228 compensation contracts that were voluntarily disclosed by listed companies between 2004 and 2010. The details of these contracts are available from the CNINFO website (http://www.cninfo.com.cn/). As of December 31, 2010, there were 2141 listed companies with A shares in China and about 11% of these companies voluntarily disclosed their executive compensation contracts.
Whether the disclosed contracts were actually executed is debatable. Among the companies that disclosed their compensation contracts, only some explicitly reported the execution of the contracts.5 For the companies that did not do so, we verify the execution by examining whether the companies’ actual compensation was the same as the amount calculated based on the agreement in the contract.6 Although we could not verify the contracts individually, we conclude that they were executed fairly well according to the validity of the publicly disclosed contracts.
Table 1 presents statistics of the sample compensation contracts. Panel A presents the annual distribution of the sample between 2004 and 2010. The 228 executive compensation contracts were disclosed by 201 companies, of which 25 companies disclosed two contracts and two companies disclosed three contracts. Before 2007, few companies disclosed their executive compensation contracts. The number increases gradually after 2008, with 59 executive compensation contracts being disclosed in 2010. Among the 228 contracts, 89 (39%) are from non-government-controlled companies. Of the 139 (61%) contracts disclosed by government-controlled companies, 41 were disclosed by central government-controlled companies. Local-government-controlled companies disclosed 98 contracts. Thus, compared with private companies, more government-controlled companies voluntarily disclosed their executive compensation contracts.7