This paper compares executive pay–performance sensitivities between Canadian firms and US firms. Examining the data for 365 Canadian firms and 675 US firms over the years 1991–1994, we find that the pay–performance sensitivity associated with direct pay and stock ownership is smaller in Canadian firms than in US firms but that the difference diminishes as firm size increases. We also find that during this period Canadian firms underperformed US firms and Canadian CEOs were paid substantially lower than were their US counterparts. Our findings are consistent with the argument that the pay–performance relationship, depending on the intensity of economic regulation, affects corporate performance.

Himmelberg et al. (J. Financial Econom. 53 (1999) 353–384) argue that fixed effects estimators should be used in examination of the relationship between managerial ownership and firm performance. I show that managerial ownership, while substantially different across firms, typically changes slowly from year to year within a company. With rational managers maximising long-term utility, small, one-year changes in ownership are not likely to reflect notable changes in incentives that would lead to substantive within-year changes in performance. By relying on within variation, fixed effects estimators may not detect an effect of ownership on performance even if one exists.

In Mar. 2010, Japan’s financial regulator implemented the country’s first legislation concerning the disclosure of director compensation for named individuals. Using the first publicly available data for Japanese executives, we document direct evidence on the level, structure, and mechanisms of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation in Japan and perform a matched-sample comparison between Japan and the United States. In contrast to the findings of recent studies showing that international differentials in CEO pay have largely disappeared since the mid-2000s, our results show strikingly large differences between the Japanese and American systems that are difficult to explain by differences in conventional incentive contracts.

By examining a sample of non-listed Chinese firms, we provide the first evidence from China for the effect of managerial ownership on firm performance. In matching-sample comparisons, we find that firms of significant managerial ownership outperform firms whose managers do not own equity shares. Our further results indicate the relation between firm performance and managerial ownership is nonlinear, and the inflection point at which the relation turns negative occurs at ownership above 50%. Compared with previous studies, our results are less likely to suffer from an endogeneity problem due to the non-list nature of our sample and the unique institutional environment in China.

China introduced employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) in 1992 purely as an employee incentive scheme. The government initiated the policy experiment on ESOPs as part of China’s reform of its state-owned enterprises, and it was abruptly terminated 2years after initiation. This policy experiment resulted in an exogenous sample of ESOPs that allows us to provide the first evidence from Chinese firms on the performance-ESOP relation. After examining a variety of performance measures, including ROA, ROE, Tobin’s q, and productivity, we find little difference in performance between ESOP firms and non-ESOP firms.