企业内部薪酬差距与人力资本结构调整

本文考察薪酬差距如何影响企业内部的人力资本结构变动。基于员工不同教育程度划分人力资本层次,本文研究发现:(1)薪酬差距的增加显著降低了大学学历员工的比例,同时提升了高中及以下学历员工的比例;(2)通过构造工具变量和基于全球性经济危机的场景设定,我们发现薪酬差距和人力资本结构之间存在显著的因果关系;(3)在薪酬差距水平较高的情况下,薪酬差距的增加显著吸引了更有可能进入企业中高层的高学历员工。在薪酬差距水平较低的情况下,扩大薪酬差距显著提升(降低)了高中及以下学历(大学学历)员工比例,一个可能原因在于不同学历员工的议价能力存在差异。(4)薪酬差距与人力资本结构变化之间的相关性主要体现在规模较大、管理者平均年龄较低的企业。(5)人力资本结构在薪酬差距影响创新的过程中发挥了显著的中介效应,薪酬差距提升了研究生和本科学历员工比例,促进了企业创新。     

Political promotion incentives and within-firm pay gap: Evidence from China

In this paper, we investigate how the promotion incentive of politicians affects the pay gap between executives and employees in local firms. We find that the promotion incentive of local politicians significantly reduces the within-firm pay gap. This effect is more pronounced for large firms, firms in regions subject to more government intervention, state-owned-enterprises, private firms with political connections, and firms with more geographically concentrated operations. Our findings are robust to the use of the loss of top-rank political connections and economics loss due to earthquakes as instrumental variables for the promotion incentive. Furthermore, a reduction in pay gap is mainly driven by an increase in employee pay, instead of a decrease in executive pay. Overall, this study sheds light on the determinants of within-firm pay gaps from the perspective of the career concerns of local politicians.     

The effect of corporate tax avoidance on salary distribution——Empirical evidence from publicly listed companies in China

Corporate tax avoidance is ubiquitous and has a wide range of economic implications. In this paper, we investigate the effect of corporate tax avoidance on the pay level for employees and the internal pay gap between executives and ordinary employees based on the perspective of salary distribution. The results show that corporate tax avoidance can significantly improve the average pay level of all the staff, but the “inclusive” benefit on employee remuneration brought by tax avoidance is not evenly distributed. More of the increased remunerations are allocated to the top management, further widening executives-ordinary employees pay gap. In addition, evidence from the cross-section analysis reveals that the current life cycle, the level of realized pay, and the short-term investment strategy in Chinese publicly listed companies can significantly affect the relationship between corporate tax avoidance and the internal pay gap. Further analysis suggests that the remuneration-increase effect of corporate tax avoidance can contribute to improving employees' efficiency, but the uneven distribution of tax-saving benefits interferes with such improvement to some extent. Overall, our results demonstrate that reasonable and effective corporate tax avoidance features a certain degree of “inclusiveness” since it helps raise the pay level of the whole staff, which sheds light on the necessity of persistent implementation of tax and fee reduction policies in China.     

Executive compensation and aspirational peer benchmarking

Using novel data on explicit compensation benchmarking peer groups, I document that small public firms engage in upward compensation benchmarking to a much greater extent than larger firms. Small firms choose aspirational peers that reflect their executives’ shifting opportunity sets. For these firms, compensation benchmarking is indicative of future growth and performance, and the rate at which pay adjusts toward peer levels is sensitive to executives’ outside employment opportunities. Growing and outperforming small firms strategically use upward benchmarking to adjust pay in an effort to retain valuable managerial talent.     

Justifying top management pay in a transitional economy

We investigate some aspects of top management pay in China's listed firms. We find positive pay and performance sensitivities and elasticities for top executives. In terms of magnitude, these sensitivities are similar to those reported in U.S. firms during the 1970s. However, the pay and performance relation is slightly weaker for firms located in less developed provinces. We also find that the pay disparities between top managers and employees are positively related to a firm's performance. Thus, it appears that any deviation away from a manager-worker compensation norm has to be justified by superior firm performance. In additional analyses, we find that managers' perquisites are not related to performance.     

Prestige,Promotion, and Pay

We develop a theory in which financial (and other professional services) firms design career structures to “sell” prestigious jobs to qualified candidates. Firms create less prestigious entry-level jobs, which serve as currency for employees to pay for the right to compete for the more prestigious jobs. In optimal career structures, entry-level employees (“associates”) compete for better-paid and more prestigious positions (“managing directors” or “partners”). The model provides new implications relating job prestige to compensation, employment, competition, and the size of the financial sector.     

The effects of employee stock option plans on operating performance in Chinese firms

As a part of the ongoing liberalization of the marketplace, Chinese regulators adopted the guideline called “Regulation of Equity Incentive Plans (trial)” to allow firms to provide employee incentives through employee stock option plans. Firms began initiating the plans in 2006. We investigate the impact of these plans on firm performance by comparing option-award firms with similar non-award matching firms. The change in ROE for the option-award firms is significantly higher than the matching firms. This is primarily due to their performance holding up better during the global financial crisis while the matching firms’ performance deteriorates. The stock price of these firms shows a positive reaction to the announcement, but no long-term abnormal returns. The better ROE performance for option-award firms is strong for subsets of the sample that are likely to benefit more from incentivized employees; specifically, privately owned firms, firms with higher board independence, and smaller firms. After various robustness tests, we conclude that the higher performance comes from the employee incentives, rather than earnings manipulation, a replacement of cash compensation, a binding of employees to executives, or gaming vesting periods.     

Incentive Compensation When Executives Can Hedge the Market: Evidence of Relative Performance Evaluation in the Cross Section

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 “undo” 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.     

Does the executive labor market discipline? Labor market incentives and earnings management

This paper investigates the role of outside options in the executive labor market on earnings management decisions. To proxy for executives’ outside options, we use the number of times other firms cite the executive’s firm as a compensation peer. We find that executives with more citations conduct less earnings management. Exploiting the 2006 SEC requirement for compensation peer disclosure as a quasi-natural shock to executives’ awareness of outside options, we show that the executives who should be more responsive to outside options significantly reduce earnings management. Cross-sectional tests support a labor market discipline channel of outside options. Finally, we exploit state-level recognition of Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine and enforcement of non-compete agreements as cross-sectional restrictions on labor mobility and show that the impact of peer citations on reducing earnings management is stronger when there are fewer restrictions on mobility.     

上市企业员工满意度与创新——来自“中国年度最佳雇主100强”的经验证据

本文以2011－2017年沪深两市的A股上市企业为研究对象,以是否入选“中国年度最佳雇主100强”榜单衡量上市企业的员工满意度,考察员工满意度对企业创新的影响。研究表明,入选榜单的企业平均而言比其它主要特征相似的匹配企业的专利申请总数高约47%。这一效应主要体现在发明专利和实用新型专利上,而在外观设计专利上不显著。进一步地,员工满意度可以通过提高失败容忍度来提升企业创新。最后,经济后果检验表明,员工满意度的提高可以显著提升员工的创新效率和企业全要素生产率,说明较高的员工满意度有助于企业效率和长期价值的提升。     

The effect of disclosure on the pay-performance relation

We examine whether greater transparency leads to improved evaluation and rewarding of management. We posit that disclosure improves board effectiveness at monitoring executives and in strengthening the link between pay and performance. We use management guidance as our empirical proxy for disclosure and document the following. We predict and find higher sensitivity of CEO compensation to performance (both accounting and stock returns) for firms that issue management guidance than for firms that do not. Our results are robust to multiple tests that address the potential endogeneity of management’s decision to issue guidance (using a Heckman self-selection model, employing a matched-sample approach, and identifying a subsample of firms in which increased disclosure is likely to be exogenous), tests that control for alternative explanations, and tests that use conference calls as an alternative disclosure metric.     

Is there a gender gap in CEO compensation?

The gender pay gap generates significant political and social debate. This study contributes to this discussion by examining if a gender pay gap exists at the highest level of corporate management, the CEOs. While previous studies have documented a gender pay gap for most levels of executives the findings with respect to CEOs are conflicting. In this paper we focus only on CEO's as it is the most homogenous of executive roles and does not require us to assume that executives with similar titles undertake identical roles. Our evidence is based on 291 US firm-years for the period of 1998–2010. We do not find any association between CEO pay and gender using both the total sample and a sample matched using propensity scores to control for firm characteristics. These insignificant results hold for total pay, salary and bonuses, and for different matching procedures and econometric specifications. Our results therefore indicate that women who rise through the “glass ceiling” to the level of CEO are remunerated at similar levels to their male counterparts.     

SIX CHALLENGES IN DESIGNING EQUITY-BASED PAY

The past two decades have seen a dramatic increase in the equitybased pay of U.S. corporate executives, an increase that has been driven almost entirely by the explosion of stock option grants. When properly designed, equity‐based pay can raise corporate productivity and shareholder value by helping companies attract, motivate, and retain talented managers. But there are good reasons to question whether the current forms of U.S. equity pay are optimal. In many cases, substantial stock and option payoffs to top executives–particularly those who cashed out much of their holdings near the top of the market–appear to have come at the expense of their shareholders, generating considerable skepticism about not just executive pay practices, but the overall quality of U.S. corporate governance. At the same time, many companies that have experienced sharp stock price declines are now struggling with the problem of retaining employees holding lots of deep‐underwater options. This article discusses the design of equity‐based pay plans that aim to motivate sustainable, or long‐run, value creation. As a first step, the author recommends the use of longer vesting periods and other requirements on executive stock and option holdings, both to limit managers' ability to “time” the market and to reduce their incentives to take shortsighted actions that increase near‐term earnings at the expense of longer‐term cash flow. Besides requiring “more permanent” holdings, the author also proposes a change in how stock options are issued. In place of popular “fixed value” plans that adjust the number of options awarded each year to reflect changes in the share price (and that effectively reward management for poor performance by granting more options when the price falls, and fewer when it rises), the author recommends the use of “fixed number” plans that avoid this unintended distortion of incentives. As the author also notes, there is considerable confusion about the real economic cost of options relative to stock. Part of the confusion stems, of course, from current GAAP accounting, which allows companies to report the issuance of at‐the‐money options as costless and so creates a bias against stock and other forms of compensation. But, coming on top of the “opportunity cost” of executive stock options to the company's shareholders, there is another, potentially significant cost of options (and, to a lesser extent, stock) that arises from the propensity of executives and employees to place a lower value on company stock and options than well‐diversified outside investors. The author's conclusion is that grants of (slow‐vesting) stock are likely to have at least three significant advantages over employee stock options:

• ? they are more highly valued by executives and employees (per dollar of cost to shareholders);
• ? they continue to provide reasonably strong ownership incentives and retention power, regardless of whether the stock price rises or falls, because they don't go underwater; and
• ? the value of such grants is much more transparent to stockholders, employees, and the press.

     

Do Firms Use Time‐Vested Stock‐Based Pay to Keep Research and Development Investments Secret?

I find that executives’ unvested equity holdings are larger when executives are employed by R&D‐intensive firms in industries that rely more on secrecy to profit from R&D. Moreover, I find that this relation is more pronounced for executives with a greater ability to exploit R&D‐related information and also holds for nonexecutive employees. In addition, I find that these firms use option grants with longer vesting periods and that unvested equity holdings reduce the likelihood that their executives leave to find employment elsewhere. Overall, my findings are consistent with firms using time‐vested stock‐based pay to reduce the leakage of R&D‐related information to competitors through employee mobility.     

Why Do Firms Use Incentives That Have No Incentive Effects?

This paper illustrates why firms might choose to implement stock option plans or other pay instruments that reward “luck.” I consider a model where adjusting compensation contracts is costly and where employees' outside opportunities are correlated with their firms' performance. The model may help to explain the use and recent rise of broad‐based stock option plans, as well as other financial instruments, even when these pay plans have no effect on employees' on‐the‐job behavior. The model suggests that agency theory's often‐overlooked participation constraint may be an important determinant of some common compensation schemes, particularly for employees below the highest executive ranks.     

What Public Companies Can Learn from Private Equity Pay Plans

Studies of private equity pay, including one by current SEC commissioner Robert Jackson, have pointed to restrictions on equity sales as a key difference between private equity and public company pay. In this article, the author argues that there is another very important difference: equity compensation in PE pay plans is typically front loaded, with top executives of portfolio companies often required to buy shares, and receiving upfront option grants on three times the number of shares they purchase. Such front‐loaded equity compensation allows PE pay plans to avoid the unintended effects of the “competitive pay policy” that have been embraced by public companies for the past 50 years. Competitive pay—targeted, for example, to provide 50th percentile total compensation regardless of past performance—has the effect of creating a systematic “performance penalty,” rewarding poor performance with more shares and penalizing superior performance with fewer shares. The author's research shows that, for public companies during the past decade or so, the number of shares granted has fallen by 7% for each 10% increase in share prices—and that, primarily for this reason, the front loaded option grants used by PE firms have provided five times more incentive (“pay leverage”) than the average public company's annual series of equity grants. What's more, to the extent that PE pay has been guided by partnership and fixed‐sharing concepts rather than competitive pay, it is the spiritual heir to the value‐sharing concepts that guided public company pay in the first half of the 20th century. For 60 years, General Motors used value sharing in “economic profit”—10% of GM's profit above a 7% return on capital was the formula for the bonus pool for many years—as the basis for all incentive compensation. The author uses the GM history to highlight four ways to improve public company incentives and corporate governance.     

The effect of unionization on firms’ earnings management and employee compensation: Evidence from a regression discontinuity design

This study examines the effect of unionization on US firms’ accruals-based earnings management and future employee compensation expenses by employing a research design that overcomes the inherent endogeneity issue of the relationship between unionization and earnings management. First, by comparing firms that just pass unionization by a small number of votes to those that just barely lose elections, the regression discontinuity design estimations document significant downward accruals earnings management for firms that barely pass unionization, compared to those that barely fail to pass unionization. Second, the association between unionization and earnings management is only significant in US states without right-to-work legislation, where unions are more powerful. These findings are consistent with recently unionized firms’ incentives to report lower earnings in order to mitigate unions’ demands for greater employee compensation. Further, for firms that barely pass unionization, we find that: (1) unions cannot fully “undo” the effects of earnings management, that is, downward managed earnings depress future compensation expenses, and (2) firms cannot fully “undo” the effects of unionization, that is, compensation expenses increase after unionization despite the downward earnings management.     

Shareholder Votes and Proxy Advisors: Evidence from Say on Pay

We investigate the economic role of proxy advisors (PAs) in the context of mandatory “say on pay” votes, a novel and complex item requiring significant firm‐specific analysis. PAs are more likely to issue an Against recommendation at firms with poor performance and higher levels of CEO pay and do not appear to follow a “one‐size‐fits‐all” approach. PAs’ recommendations are the key determinant of voting outcome but the sensitivity of shareholder votes to these recommendations varies with the institutional ownership structure, and the rationale behind the recommendation, suggesting that at least some shareholders do not blindly follow these recommendations. More than half of the firms respond to the adverse shareholder vote triggered by a negative recommendation by engaging with investors and making changes to their compensation plan. However, we find no market reaction to the announcement of such changes, even when material enough to result in a favorable recommendation and vote the following year. Our findings suggest that, rather than identifying and promoting superior compensation practices, PAs' key economic role is processing a substantial amount of executive pay information on behalf of institutional investors, hence reducing their cost of making informed voting decisions. Our findings contribute to the literature on shareholder voting and the related policy debate.     

Lucky CEOs and Lucky Directors

We study the relation between opportunistic timing of option grants and corporate governance failures, focusing on “lucky” grants awarded at the lowest price of the grant month. Option grant practices were designed to provide lucky grants not only to executives but also to independent directors. Lucky grants to both CEOs and directors were the product of deliberate choices, not of firms’ routines, and were timed to make them more profitable. Lucky grants are associated with higher CEO compensation from other sources, no majority of independent directors, no outside blockholder on the compensation committee, and a long‐serving CEO.