Home
Subscribe Latest Issue
Executive Editor: David Hirshleifer ♦ Editors: Geert Bekaert, Andrew Karolyi, Alexander Ljungqvist, Laura Starks, Pietro Veronesi, Michael Weisbach

Published Nov 2009 in volume 22, number 12 .

Tunnel-Proofing the Executive Suite: Transparency, Temptation, and the Design of Executive Compensation

  • Thomas H. Noe (University of Oxford and Tulane University)

This paper considers optimal compensation for a CEO who is entrusted with administering corporate assets honestly. Optimal compensation designs maximize integrity at minimum cost. These designs are very "low powered," i.e., while specifying a lower bound for performance and increasing pay with performance, they increase compensation at a rapidly decreasing rate. Thus, integrity considerations engender optimal compensation packages that closely resemble the very pervasive 80/120 bonus plans, exactly the sort of compensation that Jensen (2003) argues should compromise integrity. Under optimal designs, expected compensation increases linearly with firm size, and increases in the market/book ratio. Moreover, given optimal compensation, CEO asset diversion is limited to high market-to-book firms that have received negative productivity shocks.

View full text | Download PDF


No addenda available for this article.


Other papers by Thomas H. Noe


 

|   Contact   |