The State Board of Administration (SBA) sponsored an executive compensation research study by Farient Advisors LLC, covering 1,800 companies, 24 Industry groups, and fourteen years of data (from 1998-2011). The research project identifies the primary metrics used in executive compensation plans, overall and by industry, company size, and valuation premiums, and then tests these metrics to determine whether the metrics being used have the highest impact on total stock returns.

The study provides the most definitive answer to date on a critical question—are companies choosing their long-term incentive metrics wisely for the most sustainable benefit to shareowners?

…continue reading: Performance Metrics and Their Link to Value

Current views regarding the proper pay plan design to achieve pay for performance vary. This post discusses the three dimensions of pay for performance, demonstrates how to measure them using historical pay data, and presents a simple pay plan that achieves perfect pay for performance (PP4P) using annual grants of performance shares. It also highlights pay practices that weaken pay for performance and offers recommendations for directors to deepen their understanding of pay-for-performance issues.

…continue reading: Achieving Pay for Performance

A growing number of corporations are releasing stand-alone sustainability reports. To provide insight into corporate sustainability performance, many reports contain sets of performance indicators. However, questions remain about what should be reported and the indicators disclosed vary widely. This report presents an analysis of the indicators disclosed in 94 Canadian corporate sustainability reports.

Sustainability policies, plans, programs, and projects have been initiated in corporations around the world. Given the broad nature of sustainability, the breadth and depth of these initiatives varies widely. For example, initiatives as diverse as measuring a corporation’s carbon footprint, fostering diversity in the workplace, and supporting community development could all be classified under the umbrella of sustainability. These initiatives are of interest to a variety of internal and external stakeholders. Depending on the issue, these stakeholders may include employees, investors, customers, suppliers, regulators, nongovernmental organizations, and local communities, to name a few.

One important way corporations share information about their sustainability initiatives is through the release of publicly available reports. Although the titles of these reports differ, they typically include words such as “sustainability,” “responsibility,” “accountability,” or “citizenship,” and they focus on addressing the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of corporate performance through a review of both qualitative and quantitative information. (For the remainder of this issue, the term “sustainability report” is used.)

…continue reading: Reporting on Corporate Sustainability Performance

Most of the empirical work on executive compensation investigates the role of contemporaneous performance measures in setting cash compensation, ignoring the relevance of past performance measures and the structure of cash compensation. In our paper, The Relation between CEO Compensation and Past Performance, forthcoming in The Accounting Review, we focus on the relation between cash compensation components (salary and bonus) and past performance measures as signals of a CEO’s ability.

We first develop a simple two-period principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection. Our model suggests that salary is adjusted to meet the reservation utility and information rent, and is positively correlated over time to reflect ability. Bonus serves to address moral hazard and adverse selection problems by separating agents into contracts with different levels of risk. Agents are screened and receive different bonus arrangements according to their types. The higher an agent’s type, the more sensitive his bonus is to contemporaneous performance. A higher ability agent receives a larger portion of his compensation in the form of bonus and less as salary. For a given agent, salary increases with his past performance and higher current salary predicts higher future performance. Current bonus, however, is negatively correlated with both past and future performance.

…continue reading: The Relation between CEO Compensation and Past Performance

As noted by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO), “In the aftermath of the financial crisis, executives and their boards realize that ad hoc risk management is no longer tolerable and that current processes may be inadequate in today’s rapidly evolving business world.” [1] However, especially for nonfinancial companies that may be relatively new to these topics, enhancing risk management can be a somewhat daunting task.

This article focuses on two key aspects of the relationship between risk and strategy: (1) understanding the organization’s strategic risks and the related risk management processes, and (2) understanding how risk is considered and embedded in the organization’s strategy setting and performance measurement processes. These two areas not only deserve the attention of boards, but also fit closely with one of the primary responsibilities of the board — risk oversight.

…continue reading: Strategic Risk Management: A Primer for Directors

In 2002, the UK began requiring an advisory shareholder vote on the annual executive and non-executive director compensation practices of UK-incorporated quoted companies (“UK Companies”). Eight years later, in July 2010, the US followed suit when President Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the “Dodd-Frank Act”), providing for an advisory say-on-pay vote for most large US public companies.

The UK government has now gone one step further by proposing to reform the approval process for director remuneration, including through the introduction of a binding shareholder vote for all UK Companies that must occur not less frequently than every three years. The new UK proposal does not stem from guidelines or mandates adopted by any European or other supra-national body. Rather, the proposal was the initiative of the UK government made at the national level in consultation with companies, shareholders, institutional investors and other interested parties. The UK approach, if ultimately implemented as expected, could be a powerful example for US investors seeking to drive change in executive compensation practices.

We discuss below the current state of say-on-pay in the US and the UK reforms.

…continue reading: Binding Shareholder Say-on-Pay Vote in UK

In the paper, The Effectiveness of Institutional Investors in Evaluating Analysts, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine the effectiveness of institutional investors in evaluating analysts by comparing the performance of recommendations made by AAs—star analysts elected by institutional investors—with those made by other analysts.

We ask four related questions. First, does the AA status at least partially reflect analyst skill? That is, if AAs make more valuable recommendations, is it because of skill, or other factors such as luck, market influence, or access to management? If investors are effective in evaluating analysts, we expect the AA status to be indicative of skill. Second and closely related to the first question, does the AA status contain information about the analyst that is not entirely captured by other observable characteristics? The answer should be affirmative if institutional investors uncover unique information about analysts. Third, can institutional investors and the AA election process adapt to major changes brought to the industry by regulations and labor market movements? And finally, who benefits the most from the elected star analysts’ views?

…continue reading: The Effectiveness of Institutional Investors in Evaluating Analysts

Few doubt that executive compensation arrangements encouraged the excessive risk taking by banks that led to the recent Financial Crisis. Accordingly, academics and lawmakers have called for the reform of banker pay practices. In our paper, Pay for Regulator Performance, forthcoming in the Southern California Law Review, we argue that regulator pay is to blame as well, and that fixing it may be easier and more effective than reforming banker pay. Regulatory failures during the Financial Crisis resulted at least in part from a lack of sufficient incentives for examiners to act aggressively to prevent excessive risk. Bank regulators are rarely paid for performance. They are paid a fixed salary that does not depend on whether their actions improve banks’ performance, protect banks from failure, or increase social welfare.

We propose instead that regulators, specifically bank examiners, be compensated with a debt-heavy mix of phantom bank equity and debt, as well as a separate bonus linked to the timing of the decision to shut down a bank. [1] Giving examiners a stake in bank performance, both upside and downside, will improve their incentives to act in the public interest. A pay-for-performance culture will work better for bank examiners than other bureaucrats because of the objective metrics (i.e., stock and debt prices) available that directly track social welfare outcomes. We do not discount the value of public spiritedness as an inducement toward good regulatory performance.  We also believe, however, that monetary incentives tied objectively to socially desirable outcomes could improve examiner incentives, especially given the failure of existing inducements in the run-up to the Financial Crisis.

…continue reading: Pay for Regulator Performance

In our paper, Executive Compensation and Research & Development Intensity, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine the mediating effect of R&D intensity on the weights on signals of ability and financial performance measures in executive compensation contracts. There are many prior studies that investigate the impact of R&D intensity on total executive compensation (e.g., Dechow and Sloan 1991; Kwon and Yin 2006; Cheng 2004). However, prior studies did not incorporate adverse selection in their analysis. In other words, they did not investigate how R&D intensity affects the role of managerial ability in executive compensation. In contrast, we investigate how R&D intensity impacts the weights placed on human capital measures such as technical work experience, science and engineering degrees, and past experience in R&D intensive firms.

…continue reading: Executive Compensation and R&D Intensity

In our paper, Which Performance Measures Do Investors around the World Value the Most – and Why?, which was recently accepted for publication in the Accounting Review, we examine the value relevance of a comprehensive set of summary performance measures including sales, earnings, comprehensive income, and operating cash flows.

Academics and practitioners have recently begun to move away from proposing “better” measures of earnings to instead focusing on earnings quality attributes—such as persistence, predictability, smoothness, and timeliness—that may make a particular earnings measure more useful in equity valuation, especially if such attributes capture some dimension of information risk about the firm’s future performance.

…continue reading: Worldwide Investor Preferences for Performance Measures