Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936-2005

Carola Frydman and Raven E. Saks

No 14145, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We analyze the long-run trends in executive compensation using a new panel dataset of top executives in large publicly-held firms from 1936 to 2005, collected from corporate reports. This historic perspective reveals several surprising new facts that conflict with inferences based only on data from the recent decades. First, the median real value of compensation was remarkably flat from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s, even during times of rapid economic expansion and aggregate firm growth. This finding contrasts sharply with the steep upward trajectory of pay over the past thirty years, which coincided with a period of similarly large increases in aggregate firm size. A second surprising finding is that the sensitivity of an executive's wealth to firm performance was not inconsequentially small for most of our sample period. Thus, recent years were not the first time when compensation arrangements served to align managerial incentives with those of shareholders. Taken together, the long-run trends in the level and structure of compensation pose a challenge to several common explanations for the widely-debated surge in executive pay of the past several decades, including changes in firms' size, rent extraction by CEOs, and increases in managerial incentives.

JEL-codes: G30 J33 M52 N82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cfn and nep-his
Note: CF DAE LS
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published as Carola Frydman & Raven E. Saks, 2010. "Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936--2005," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 23(5), pages 2099-2138.

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Related works:
Journal Article: Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936--2005 (2010)
Working Paper: Executive compensation: a new view from a long-term perspective, 1936-2005 (2007)
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