Explaining Executive Pay: The roles of managerial power and complexity [Paperback]

Lukas Hengartner shows that both firm complexity and managerial power are associated with higher pay levels. This suggests that top managers are paid for the complexity of their job and that more powerful top managers receive pay in excess of the level that would be optimal for shareholders.The idea of studying executive pay was born in a lecture on option valuation in spring 2002 at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration NHH. At that time, I started wondering how companies that had granted large amounts of stock options to their executives would react to the sharp decreases in share prices that could be observed since 2000. Based on this interest, I wrote my NHH master thesis about Employee stock options and falling share prices investigating a sample of Norwegian IT companies. These companies were especially likely to both have granted substantial amounts of options and suffered from severe declines in share prices. The topic of executive pay continued to attract my interest, mainly because I felt that it offered opportunities to make a real contribution to academic researchers and policy makers alike. In summer 2002, I wrote my master thesis at the University of St. Gallen HSG. I investigated the determinants of executive stock option plan adoptions of Swiss sto- listed companies. Major results were that both large outside shareholders and CEO duality influenced whether companies would adopt stock option plans. At that time, very little information about executive pay was disclosed in Switzerland. However, the Swiss Stock Exchange SWX issued new listing guidelines that required companies to disclose detailed information on Corporate Governance starting from the annual report 2002 to be published in 2003.The compansation setting processResearch review on executive payResearch review on director payAre executives paid for the complexity of the job they have?Can powerful managers extract rents?Research methods and resultsDr. Lukas HengartnerlC4