Is executive compensation influenced by the composition of the board of directors? About 8% of chief executive officers (CEOs) are reciprocally interlocked with another CEO the current CEO of firm A serves as a director of firm B and the current CEO of firm B serves as a director of firm A. Roughly 20% of firms have at least one current or retired employee sitting on the board of another firm and vice versa. I investigate how these and other features of board composition affect CEO pay by using a sample of 9,804 director positions in America's largest companies. CEOs who lead interlocked firms earn significantly higher compensation. Also, interlocked CEOs tend to head larger firms. After controlling for firm and CEO characteristics, the pay gap is reduced dramatically. However, when firms that are interlocked due to documented business relationships are considered not interlocked, the measured return to interlock is as high as 17%. There also is evidence that the return to interlock was higher in the 1970s than in the early 1990s.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Volume (Year): 32 (1997) Issue (Month): 03 (September) Pages: 331-344 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
Contact details of provider: Postal: The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 2RU UK Fax: +44 (0)1223 325150 Email: Web page: http://journals.cambridge.org/jid_JFQ
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Mike Eden).
Related research
Keywords:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)