Review of Finance Vol. 1 No. 2 1997
Comment on ‘Top Management Compensation and the Structure of the Board of Directors in Commercial Banks’
Abstract
As argued by Jensen (1993), the primary tasks of a firm’s board of directors are to advise, hire, fire and determine the level and form of managerial compensation. Managerial pay can be structured as part cash and in part be tied to a performance index, such as corporate earnings or the firm’s stock price. The latter effectively aligns the interest of managers with those of stockholders, which in turn reduces agency problems related to free cash flow, managerial time horizons and effort levels. At the same time, stock-based compensation increases managerial exposure to non-diversifiable risk, which may cause risk-averse managers to underinvest in risky projects. The trade-off between the benefits of managerial incentive alignment and the cost of underinvestment is largely an empirical issue, and the widespread observation that managerial compensation is primarily paid in cash 1 suggests that managerial risk aversion weighs heavily or that boards generally resort to substitute monitoring mechanisms. The paper by Angbazo and Narayanan (1997) is part of a rapidly growing empirical literature attempting to identify important cross-sectional determinants
- DOI
- 10.1023/a:1009777032103
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 261-264
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref