高管薪酬和激励

高管薪酬和激励内容摘要：

uses on pensation and equity incentives, leaving aside career concerns and the labor market for managerial talent. In other words, it restricts attention to financial incentives. The key to understanding financial incentives is recognizing that they arise from the entire portfolio of equity holdings and not simply from current pay. Equity incentives, then, are the incentives to increase the stock price arising from the managers‟ ownership of financial securities in the firm. For example, a CEO may receive 100,000 options this year, which might add to 400,000 options granted in previous years, for a total of 500,000 options held. If the stock price decreases, then the value of the 100,000 options granted this year declines— but so does the value of the options accumulated from previous years. Since the CEO will care about the whole stock of 500,000 options, not simply this year‟s 100,000, executive pensation received in any given year provides only a partial picture of CEO wealth and incentives. To understand CEO incentives fully, it is important to focus on the aggregate amount of shares, restricted stock, and stock options that the CEO owns in the firm. The evidence shows that CEOs have plenty of financial incentives, arising primarily from CEO ownership of stock and options in their firms. Again, we would stress that such financial incentives are only one factor motivating executives. Agents are as likely to be motivated by intrinsic factors of the job, career concerns, social norms, tournaments, and the like. One problem with stock options and other forms of incentive pay is not that they provide too few incentives, but that they may lead to unintended consequences. It is well known that incentives can bring about behavior by the agent that was unanticipated by the principal. In a classic paper, Steven Kerr highlighted the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B. In short, he articulated the notion that one gets what one pays for. If one rewards activity A and not B, then people will exert effort on A, while deemphasizing B. Kerr illustrates his point with an array of examples from politics, industry, and human resource management. In general, this is a problem of providing appropriate incentives to agents engaging in multiple tasks. More recently, Robert Gibbons has discussed the design of incentive programs recognizing such problems. Another problem with incentive pensation is that it may encourage opportunistic behavior by managers, manipulation of performance measures, or cheating. The powerful and often unanticipated effects of financial incentives on economic outes have been documented in diverse contexts such as classroom teaching, real estate markets, vehicle inspection markets, and the behavior of physicians. In the corporate context, David Yermack demonstrates that CEOs opportunistically time the award of option grants around earnings announcements in order to increase their pensation. Other studies find that private information is used by executives to engineer abnormally large option exercises and hence the payouts from those options. In addition, studies show that firms with more incentives are associated with greater earnings manipulation. Recent studies show that the likelihood of a firm being the target of fraud allegations is positively correlated with option incentives. In short, options and incentive pay may motivate managerial behavior that is not always anticipated or ideal. When designing pensation p lans, boards must be aware of the unwanted as well as beneficial effects of incentives. Conclusions Executive pensation is a controversial and plex subject that continues to attract the attention of the media, policymakers,。