Because of the various restrictions on executive compensation, managers are expected to enjoy more managerial perks to compensate for lower salaries. Chen et al. (2005) find consistent results. Chen et al. (2009) further find that the probability of management fraud is positively related to compensation regulations. Chen et al. (2010) extend previous studies by providing evidence of a trade-off between executive compensation and managerial perks. They find that both compensation and managerial perks are higher in years and regions with higher marketization indices, and that a higher proportion of managerial perks are replaced by executive compensation.
In summary, the majority of previous studies use accounting performance such as ROA or ROE to examine the sensitivity of executive compensation to firm performance. However, these studies fail to discuss the details of executive compensation contracts, which may result in an omitted variable problem in the research design. We attempt to open up the “black box” of companies’ compensation contracts and provide some guidance for future research on executive compensation in China.