This paper examines the impact of domestic and foreign acquisitions on chief executive officer (CEO) compensation packages using a sample of 147 completed bids by UK companies from 1999 to 2005. We find that foreign acquisitions lead to higher CEO compensation than domestic acquisitions. Overall, our findings suggest that CEOs have strong incentives to do foreign acquisitions rather than domestic acquisitions since they receive larger compensation following a foreign acquisition regardless of how poor firm performance is. Furthermore, we observe a positive and significant relation between CEO compensation and firm size during the pre-acquisition period for firms involved in foreign acquisitions, thus their CEOs would expect to increase their compensation package through foreign acquisitions. However, our results show that there is no significant link between firm size and CEO compensation during the pre-acquisition period for firms involved in domestic acquisitions.

This paper investigates the empirical determinants of corporate cash holdings for a sample of UK firms. We focus on the importance of managerial ownership among other corporate governance characteristics including board structure and ultimate controllers of companies. We present evidence of a significant non-monotonic relation between managerial ownership and cash holdings. In addition, we observe that the way in which managerial ownership exerts influence on cash holdings does not change with board composition and, in general, the presence of ultimate controllers. The results reveal that firms' growth opportunities, cash flows, liquid assets, leverage and bank debt are important in determining cash holdings. Our analysis also suggests that firm heterogeneity and endogeneity are crucial in analysing the cash structure of firms.

We examine how the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in continental Europe affects the contractual usefulness of accounting information in executive compensation, as reflected in pay-performance sensitivity (PPS) and relative performance evaluation (RPE). The empirical evidence indicates a weak increase in accounting-based PPS in the post-adoption period, primarily driven by countries with large differences between IFRS and their previously adopted local accounting standards. We also document a significant increase in accounting-based RPE using foreign peers after the adoption. Additional analysis shows that the increase in RPE is greater for firms with more foreign sales, and for those with lower availability of domestic peers of comparable size. The overall results are consistent with the compensation committees in those countries perceiving earnings after IFRS adoption to be of higher quality and comparability. Our paper highlights an important benefit of IFRS largely ignored by the literature, that is, the higher earnings quality and comparability brought by the adoption of IFRS facilitate executive compensation contracting.