EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

CEO compensation structure following succession: Evidence of optimal incentives with career concerns

Eahab Elsaid, Wallace N. Davidson and Bradley W. Benson

The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2009, vol. 49, issue 4, 1389-1409

Abstract: To motivate managers to pursue shareholder interests, boards may design management compensation packages to reward managers for good firm performance. However, Gibbons and Murphy (1992) note that when CEOs are far from retirement, they have career concerns. In these cases, Gibbons and Murphy argue that it may not be optimal for their current compensation to be too dependent on firm performance. Testing this proposition, we find that abnormal returns are negatively related to the percentage of performance-based pay of newly hired CEOs when companies announce CEO successions. Since these newly hired CEOs are likely some distance from retirement, we interpret these results as being consistent with Gibbons and Murphy; it may be better to allow newly hired CEOs to be paid in human capital increases from the managerial labor market than to have their current pay too closely related to performance.

Keywords: CEO; succession; CEO; compensation; Managerial; incentives; Managerial; labor; market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062-9769(09)00081-7
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:quaeco:v:49:y:2009:i:4:p:1389-1409

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance is currently edited by R. J. Arnould and J. E. Finnerty

More articles in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:quaeco:v:49:y:2009:i:4:p:1389-1409