The Pricing of Relative Performance Based Incentives for Executive Compensation PDF Download

Author: Antonio Camara
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
Since 1995, more than 50 percent of the firms in the FTSE-100 have granted rewards to their senior executives, the payoffs of which are contingent on the firm's stock return relative to a bench mark return over a given period (hereafter, relative performance incentives). This paper investigates and derives closed-form solutions for a class of relative performance incentives that have a positive payoff if, in addition to the traditional contingencies, the firm's stock return is higher than the market return times a threshold. Results suggest that UK firms, in practice, when relative performance incentives (RPI's) substitute absolute performance incentives (API's) tend to (i) decrease the cost of their compensation packages; (ii) undertake more risky capital-investment projects; and (iii) avoid providing so high-powered incentives to increase shareholder wealth.

Author: Mercer, LLC
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 047047811X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
The numerous incentive approaches and combinations and their implications can be dizzying even to the compensation professional. Pay for Results provides a road map for developing and implementing executive incentives that drive business needs and strategy. It is filled with specific analytic tools, including tables, exhibits, forms, checklists. In addition, it uncovers myths in performance measurement strategy and design. Timely and thorough, this book expertly shows businesses how to drive their specific needs and strategy. Human resources and compensation officers will discover how to apply performance metrics that align with shareholder investment.

Author: Lisa K. Meulbroek
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 70

View

Book Description
This paper examines how an option plan that rewards managers for firm performance relative to some market or industry benchmark should be structured, and gauges the deadweight costs of such a plan. Relative-performance-based compensation advocates contend that conventional stock options do not adequately discriminate between strong and weak managers, typically suggesting quot;indexed options,quot; that is, options with an exercise price linked to a market or industry index, as a remedy. A close examination of indexed options, however, reveals a fundamental problem: indexed options do not function as intended. Instead, their payoff remains highly sensitive to market or industry price movements. This paper proposes an alternative option design that does remove the effects of the desired benchmark. This structure uses an option with a fixed exercise price, where the underlying asset is a portfolio comprised of the firm's stock hedged against market and industry price movements. The paper then compares the deadweight cost of this performance-benchmarked option to that of a conventional stock option. Deadweight costs inevitably accompany any equity-based compensation program, because the firm's managers must be exposed to firm-specific risks to properly align incentives, and this forced concentrated exposure prevents managers from optimal portfolio diversification. Undiversified managers are exposed to the firm's total volatility, rather than the smaller systematic portion faced by the well-diversified investor, meaning that they will always value their stock- and option-based compensation at less than its market value. I estimate the cost of this lost diversification, and find that, perhaps surprisingly, the gap between the firm's cost (the market value) and the manager's private value of an option is 57% greater for relative-performance-based options than for conventional options. The relative-performance based options have larger deadweight costs because, by design, they strip away the manager's exposure to all systematic risk, leaving her with a portfolio with an expected return no better than the risk-free rate. The paper discusses the practical implications of this analysis for firms adopting relative-performance-based option plans.

Author: Lucian A. Bebchuk
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674020634
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 308

View

Book Description
The company is under-performing, its share price is trailing, and the CEO gets...a multi-million-dollar raise. This story is familiar, for good reason: as this book clearly demonstrates, structural flaws in corporate governance have produced widespread distortions in executive pay. Pay without Performance presents a disconcerting portrait of managers' influence over their own pay--and of a governance system that must fundamentally change if firms are to be managed in the interest of shareholders. Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried demonstrate that corporate boards have persistently failed to negotiate at arm's length with the executives they are meant to oversee. They give a richly detailed account of how pay practices--from option plans to retirement benefits--have decoupled compensation from performance and have camouflaged both the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay. Executives' unwonted influence over their compensation has hurt shareholders by increasing pay levels and, even more importantly, by leading to practices that dilute and distort managers' incentives. This book identifies basic problems with our current reliance on boards as guardians of shareholder interests. And the solution, the authors argue, is not merely to make these boards more independent of executives as recent reforms attempt to do. Rather, boards should also be made more dependent on shareholders by eliminating the arrangements that entrench directors and insulate them from their shareholders. A powerful critique of executive compensation and corporate governance, Pay without Performance points the way to restoring corporate integrity and improving corporate performance.

Author: Raj Aggarwal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Executives
Languages : en
Pages : 90

View

Book Description
We argue that strategic interactions between firms in an oligopoly can explain the puzzling lack of high-powered incentives in executive compensation contracts written by shareholders whose objective is to maximize the value of their shares. We derive the optimal compensation contracts for managers and demonstrate that the use of high-powered incentives will be limited by the need to soften product market competition. In particular, when managers can be compensated based on their own and their rivals' performance, we show that there will be an inverse relationship between the magnitude of high-powered incentives and the degree of competition in the industry. More competitive industries are characterized by weaker pay-performance incentives. Empirically, we find strong evidence of this inverse relationship in the compensation of executives in the United States. Our econometric results are not consistent with alternative theories of the effect of competition on executive compensation. We conclude that strategic considerations can preclude the use of high-powered incentives, in contrast to the predictions of the standard principal-agent model.

Author: Gerald T. Garvey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
Little evidence exists that firms index executive compensation to remove the influence of marketwide factors. We argue that executives can, in principle, replicate such indexation in their private portfolios. In support, we find that market risk has little effect on the use of stock-based pay for the average executive. But executives' ability to quot;undoquot; excessive market risk can be hindered by wealth constraints and inalienability of human capital. We replicate the standard result that there is little relative performance evaluation (RPE) for the average executive, but find strong evidence of RPE for younger executives and executives with less financial wealth.

Author: Brian J. Hall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chief executive officers
Languages : en
Pages : 60

View

Book Description
Detailed data about stock option contracts are used to measure and analyze the pay to performance incentives of executive stock options. Two main issues are addressed. The first is the pay to performance incentives created by the revaluation of stock option holdings. The findings suggest that if CEO stock holdings were replaced by the same ex ante value of stock options, the pay to performance sensitivity of the median CEO would approximately double. Relative to granting at the money options, a value neutral policy of regularly granting options out of the money (Pe=1.5P) would increase pay to performance sensitivity by approximately 27 percent. The second issue is the pay to performance created by yearly stock option grants. Because most stock option plans are multi year plans, it is shown that different option granting plans have significantly different pay to performance incentives since changes in current stock prices affect the value of future option grants in different ways. Four option granting policies are compared and contrasted. Ranked from highest powered to lowest powered, these policies are: 1) LBO-style up-front options, 2) fixed number policies, 3) fixed value policies and 4) an (unofficial) policy of "back-door repricing." Empirical evidence suggests that (even ignoring the revaluation of past option grants) the pay to performance relationship in practice is stronger for 1) stock option grants relative to salary and bonus, and 2) fixed number plans relative to non-fixed number plans.

Author: Robert Gibbons
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chief executive officers
Languages : en
Pages : 60

View

Book Description
Measured individual performance often depends on random factors which also affect the performances of other workers in the same firm, industry, or market. In these cases, relative performance evaluation (RPE) can provide incentives while partially insulating workers from the common uncertainty. Basing pay on relative performance, however, generates incentives to sabotage the measured performance of co-workers, to collude with co-workers and shirk, and to apply for jobs with inept co-workers. RPE contracts also are less desirable when the output of co-workers is expensive to measure or in the presence of production externalities, as in the case of team production. The purpose of this paper is to review the benefits and costs of RPE and to test for the presence of RPE in one occupation where the benefits plausibly exceed the costs: chief executive officers (CEOs). In contrast to previous research, our empirical evidence strongly supports the RPE hypothesis-CEO pay revisions and retention probabilities are positively and significantly related to firm performance, but are negatively and significantly related to industry and market performance, ceteris paribus. Our results also suggest that CEO performance is more likely to be evaluated relative to aggregate market movements than relative to industry movements.

Author: Peter T. Chingos
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0471655082
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

View

Book Description
A definitive road map to help companies assess and refine their executive reward strategies. Responsible pay has become inextricably linked with corporate governance and long-term shareholder value creation. Responsible Executive Compensation for a New Era of Accountability shows you how to revamp your executive compensation programs to drive shareholder value creation while adhering to the high standards of the new corporate governance environment. Packed with case studies, diagnostics, and contributions from world-renowned experts in executive compensation, this vital resource offers a comprehensive overview of the critical issues affecting executive compensation practice and theory during this new era. Order your copy today!

Author: Steven Balsam
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 9780120771264
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 410

View

Book Description
General readers have no idea why people should care about what executives are paid and why they are paid the way they are. That's the reason that The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, and other popular and practitioner publications have regular coverage on them. This book not only proposes a reason - executives need incentives in order to maximize firm value (economists call this agency theory) - it also describes the nature and design of executive compensation practices. Those incentives can take the form of benefits (salary, stock options), or prerquisites (reflecting the status of the executive within the organizational culture.