Institutional investors claim to monitor and influence executive compensation practices in their portfolio
companies. Thus, compensation practices are a reasonable place to look to assess the institutions'
effectiveness in achieving their governance objectives. I explore the relationship between institutional ownership
and CEO compensation levels and equity performance sensitivity. I address ownership structure endogeneity
by using instrumental variables and fixed-effects regression models with S&P 500 index inclusion as an
instrument for institutional ownership. Results indicate that institutions fail to decrease compensation levels, but
do increase equity performance sensitivities. The results are robust to various model specifications. CRRA
simulations suggest that the level premium paid to CEOs is consistent with a utility-neutral shift in compensation
structure. At first glance, this seems to support the hypothesis that CEO labor markets are efficient. However,
results using an additional measure of the CEO's ability to extract rents are inconsistent with this conclusion.
The level premium is negatively related to institutional ownership concentration. This suggests that the IR
constraint is slack, but less so the more concentrated the institutional ownership.