Corporate governance

About: Corporate governance is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 118591 publications have been published within this topic receiving 2793582 citations.

The prince and the pauper? ceo pay in the

Abstract: We document differences in CEO pay and incentives in the United States and the United Kingdom for 1997. After controlling for size, sector and other firm and executive characteristics, CEOs in the US earn 45% higher cash compensation and 190% higher total compensation. The calculated effective ownership percentage in the US implies that the median CEO receives 1.48% of any increase in shareholder wealth compared to 0.25% in the UK The differences, can be largely attributed to greater share option awards in the US arising from institutional and cultural differences between the two countries. Corporate governance practices in the United Kingdom received increased attention in the 1990s, culminating in influential reports issued by the Cadbury (1992), Greenbury (1995) and Hampel (1998) committees. Among other recommendations, the reports outlined a best-practice framework for setting executive pay, and significantly expanded disclosure rules for UK executive compensation. The Greenbury and Hampel reports were, in part, a response to a growing controversy over chief executive officer (CEO) pay levels triggered when executives in several recently privatised electric utilities exercised share options worth millions of pounds. However, in spite of these reports, CEO pay levels rose more than 18% in 1997 alone, even as publicsector workers were being asked to accept raises of less than 3% (Buckingham and Cowe, 1998 a,b). The continuing controversy, coupled with enhanced data availability through the new disclosure requirements, has sparked considerable academic interest in UK executive pay practices. Although CEO pay levels in the United Kingdom have grown in recent years, they remain far behind pay levels enjoyed by CEOs in the United States. The international pay gap is especially pronounced after including gains realised from exercising share options. Chief executives in the 500 largest UK companies in aggregate made ?330 million (or ?660,000 each) in 1997, including ?74 million from exercising options. In contrast, the top 500 US CEOs made in aggregate ?3.2 billion (or ?6.3 million each), including ?2.0 billion from option exercises.' Indeed, Disney's Michael Eisner, dubbed by pay-critic Graef Crystal

Are You Being Served? Political Accountability and Quality of Government

Abstract: This paper explores, both formally and empirically, the political accountability mechanisms that lie behind the varying levels of public corruption and of effective governance taking place across nations. The first section develops a principal-agent model in which good governance is a function of the extent to which citizens can hold political officials accountable for their actions. Although policy-makers may have strong incentives to appropriate parts of the citizens` income, well-designed institutions (those increasing both informational flows and elite competitiveness) boost political accountability and reduce the space left for the appropriation of rents. The following sections of the paper test the model. The presence of democratic mechanisms of control and an increasingly informed electorate, measured through the frequency of newspaper readership, explain considerably well the distribution of corrupt practices and governmental ineffectiveness in three types of data sets: a large cross-section of countries in the late 1990s for which an extensive battery of governance indicators has been recently developed by Kaufmann et al. (1999a); a panel data set for the period 1980-95 and about 100 nations on corruption and bureaucratic quality based on experts` rankings; and corruption data for the cross-section of US states in the period 1977-95.

The Small World of the American Corporate Elite, 1982-2001

Abstract: This paper examines the degree of stability in the structure of the corporate elite network in the US during the 1980s and 1990s. Several studies have documented that board-to-board ties serve as a mechanism for the diffusion of corporate practices, strategies, and structures; thus, the overall structure of the network can shape the nature and rate of aggregate corporate change. But upheavals in the nature of corporate governance and nearly complete turnover in the firms and directors at the core of the network since 1980 prompt a reassessment of the network's topography. We find that the aggregate connec tivity of the network is remarkably stable and appears to be an intrinsic property of the interlock network, resilient to major changes in corporate governance. After a brief review of elite studies in the US, we take advantage of the recent advances in the theoretical and methodological tools for analyzing network structures to examine the network properties of the directors and companies in 1982, 1990,...