ESSAYS ON CEO AND EMPLOYEE COMPENSATION

Abstract

With the continued increase in executive compensation and the resulting increase in pay disparity between executives and rank-and-file employees, CEO compensation relative to the average worker pay underscores the popular apprehension related to equity vs. efficiency. This dissertation empirically examines the determinants and consequences of the CEO-worker pay ratio, and the association between acquisitions and CEO compensation. In the first chapter, I show that country-level factors such as national culture, matter in determining the CEO-worker pay ratio across countries. Using global firm-level data from 44 countries for 2002-2015, I show that the CEO-worker pay ratio is associated with national characteristics such as culture and societal equity orientation. Specifically, I find that the CEO-worker pay ratio is positively associated with power distance and masculinity of the national culture, and it is negatively associated with uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation. This pay ratio also reflects societal equity orientation, measured by income and wealth distribution proxies. This chapter contributes to the existing literature on executive compensation by documenting national culture as an important determinant of CEO-worker pay ratios globally. In the second chapter, I show that the relationship between firm value and the CEO-worker pay ratio exhibits an inverse-U shaped relation, which is consistent with elements of tournament theory, efficient contracting theory, rent extraction theory, and equity fairness theory. This is also consistent with there being an optimal pay ratio, or inflection point, beyond which increases in the pay ratio decrease firm value. I then show that the relationship between the pay ratio and firm performance differs systematically with regard to firm characteristics, i.e., in firms with a greater need for collaboration and information sharing, the optimal ratio is lower. In the final analysis, I show that pay disparity within the executive suite has little effect on firm value, rather it is the pay disparity between the named executive officers and the rank and file that drive my results. This chapter contributes to the existing literature by showing that the relationship between firm value and CEO-worker pay ratio is nonlinear. In the third chapter, I examine the effect of acquisitions, especially international acquisitions on CEO compensation, using firm-level panel data for 1995-2016, covering both international and domestic acquisitions by US firms. I find that acquisitions lead to higher CEO compensation, which can be explained by size premium, complexity premium, and opportunism. I also find that international acquisitions lead to higher CEO compensation than domestic acquisitions, which is consistent with the matching theory, as international acquisitions are larger and more complex to manage. This chapter provides direct empirical evidence on the effect of acquisitions on CEO compensation with a large database based on US firms. This chapter also adds to the literature on the comparison of international acquisition and domestic acquisition in terms of their impact on CEO compensation, which has been lacking in existing work. Overall, this dissertation advances our understanding on the determinants and consequences of the CEO-worker pay ratio, and adds insights to the literature on the implications of international acquisitions and managerial compensation.