Founding family firms, CEO incentive pay, and dual agency problems

This paper contributes to the literature on agency theory by examining relations between family involvement and CEO compensation. Using a panel of 362 small U.S. listed firms, we analyze how founding families influence firm performance through option portfolio price sensitivity. Consistent with the dual agency framework, we find that family firms have lower CEO incentive pay, which is further reduced by higher executive ownership. Interestingly, such incentive pay offsets the positive impact that families have on firm valuation. Collectively, our results show that, compared with nonfamily firms, lower incentive pay adopted by family firms due to lower agency costs mitigates the direct effect of family involvement on firm performance. Once accounting for CEO incentive pay, we do not observe performance differences between family and nonfamily firms

Incentive Pay Systems and the Management of Human Resources in France and Great Britain

Incentive pay systems have undergone major changes in recent decades. This paper investigates use of incentive pay systems in British and French private sector establishments in 2004, focusing on payment-by-results, merit pay, and profit sharing, using British and French workplace surveys: WERS and Réponse. Despite the stereotypes of Britain as a deregulated economy and France as a more coordinated social-market economy, French firms make considerably greater use of incentive pay, and particularly, merit pay. The paper explores the organisational and institutional determinants of this. It finds that personnel economics and management theories explain a significant share of the within country variation in use of incentive pay systems.incentive systems, merit pay, profit-sharing, employer organisation

Innovation, endogenous overinvestment, and incentive pay

We analyze how two key managerial tasks interact: that of growing the business through creating new investment opportunities and that of providing accurate information about these opportunities in the corporate budgeting process. We show how this interaction endogenously biases managers toward overinvesting in their own projects. This bias is exacerbated if managers compete for limited resources in an internal capital market, which provides us with a novel theory of the boundaries of the firm. Finally, managers of more risky and less profitable divisions should obtain steeper incentives to facilitate efficient investment decisions

The impact of private ownership, incentives and local development objectives on university technology transfer performance

We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay and local development objectives on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for 1995-99. We find that private universities are much more likely to adopt incentive pay than public ones, but ownership does not affect licensing performance conditional on the use of incentive pay. Adopting incentive pay is associated with about 30-40 percent more income per license. Universities with strong local development objectives generate about 30 percent less income per license, but are more likely to license to local (in-state) startup companies. In addition, we show that government constraints on university licensing activity are .costly. in terms of foregone license income and the creation of start-up companies. These results are robust to controls for observed and unobserved heterogeneity

The Relationship Between Risk, Incentive Pay, and Organizational Performance

In this study we extend agency based research by examining the role of risk in the structure of managerial compensation and its relationship to organization performance. Our results suggest that organizations facing higher risk do not place greater emphasis on short term incentives, they place less emphasis on it. Also, higher risk firms which rely on incentive pay exhibited poorer performance than high risk firms which de-emphasize incentive pay

The Impact of Private Ownership, Incentives and Local Development Objectives on University Technology Transfer Performance

We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay and local development objectives on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for 1995-99. We find that private universities are much more likely to adopt incentive pay than public ones, but ownership does not affect licensing performance conditional on the use of incentive pay. Adopting incentive pay is associated with about 30-40 percent more income per license. Universities with strong local development objectives generate about 30 percent less income per license, but are more likely to license to local (in-state) startup companies. In addition, we show that government constraints on university licensing activity are .costly. in terms of foregone license income and the creation of start-up companies. These results are robust to controls for observed and unobserved heterogeneity.incentives, performance pay, universities, technology transfer, licensing, local development

Executive pay and performance: did bankers’ bonuses cause the crisis?

This paper examines the pay-performance relationship between executive cash compensation (including bonuses) and company performance for a sample of large UK companies, focusing particularly on the financial services industry, since incentive misalignment has been blamed as one of the factors causing the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. Although we find that pay in the financial services sector is high, the cash-plus-bonus pay-performance sensitivity of financial firms is not significantly higher than in other sectors. Consequently, we conclude that it unlikely that incentive structures could be held responsible for inducing bank executives to focus on short-term results

Institutions and the Management of Human Resources: Incentive Pay Systems in France and Great Britain

Using data from large-scale establishment surveys in Britain and France, we show that incentive pay for non-managers is more widespread in France than in Britain. We explain this finding in terms of the 'beneficial constraint' arising from stronger employment protection in France, which provides an impulse to develop incentive pay; employer networking activities in France, which facilitate joint learning about its development and operation; and government fiscal incentives for profit-sharing, which reduces the cost of its operation.incentive systems, merit pay, profit-sharing, employer networks

Institutions and Contract Enforcement

We provide evidence on how two important types of institutions – dismissal barriers, and bonus pay – affect contract enforcement behavior in a market with incomplete contracts and repeated interactions. Dismissal barriers are shown to have a strong negative impact on worker performance, and market efficiency, by interfering with firms' use of firing threat as an incentive device. Dismissal barriers also distort the dynamics of worker effort levels over time, cause firms to rely more on the spot market for labor, and create a distribution of relationship lengths in the market that is more extreme, with more very short and more very long relationships. The introduction of a bonus pay option dramatically changes the market outcome. Firms are observed to substitute bonus pay for threat of firing as an incentive device, almost entirely offsetting the negative incentive and efficiency effects of dismissal barriers. Nevertheless, contract enforcement behavior remains fundamentally changed, because the option to pay bonuses causes firms to rely less on long-term relationships. Our results show that market outcomes are the result of a complex interplay between contract enforcement policies and the institutions in which they are embedded.incomplete contracts; bonus pay; efficiency wages; employment protection; firing costs; experiment

Institutions and Contract Enforcement

We provide evidence on how two important types of institutions – dismissal barriers, and bonus pay – affect contract enforcement behavior in a market with incomplete contracts and repeated interactions. Dismissal barriers are shown to have a strong negative impact on worker performance, and market efficiency, by interfering with firms' use of firing threat as an incentive device. Dismissal barriers also distort the dynamics of worker effort levels over time, cause firms to rely more on the spot market for labor, and create a distribution of relationship lengths in the market that is more extreme, with more very short and more very long relationships. The introduction of a bonus pay option dramatically changes the market outcome. Firms are observed to substitute bonus pay for threat of firing as an incentive device, almost entirely offsetting the negative incentive and efficiency effects of dismissal barriers. Nevertheless, contract enforcement behavior remains fundamentally changed, because the option to pay bonuses causes firms to rely less on long-term relationships. Our results show that market outcomes are the result of a complex interplay between contract enforcement policies and the institutions in which they are embedded.employment protection, efficiency wages, bonus pay, incomplete contracts, firing costs, experiment