With the increasing pressure following the recession, is CEO pay a Dissertation

With the increasing pressure following the recession, is CEO pay a justifiable way of rewarding CEO's A contrast between the UK - Dissertation Example Thus, with the aim to evaluate the difference in the CEO compensation structure in the US and the UK, three objectives were set. Data was gathered through previous academic papers and studies. The theories on CEO pay are disjointed and competing against each other. At the same time, the study also reveals that there is no consensus on what should be taken as fair pay. As the business environment changed, the macro-economic factors influenced CEO pay. Incentives were needed to attract and retain talent; it was also necessary to be comparable with the peer group. All these led to excessive CEO pay which suggests weak corporate governance structure and lack of management control. Firms could find loopholes even in regulations and codes of conduct. Statistics also reveal wide disparities in CEO pay and the workers’ pay. There is no consensus on the benefits of linking performance to pay and it has been used to suit individual conveniences. A comparison of the practices in the US a nd UK reveal certain differences. More of rent extraction practices can be found among the US firms where shareholders and investors have little knowledge of the firm’s operations. However, in the UK the shareholders are involved in ‘say to pay’ and the decisions are collaborative. ... ories on CEO compensation 5 2.4 CEO Pay history and current trends 7 2.5 Market Forces or Drivers of CEO compensation 9 2.6 Debates on the upward trend in CEO pay 11 2.7 CEO equity-based grants and firm performance 14 Chapter III Methodology 3.1 Chapter Overview 16 3.2 Research Phenomenon 16 3.3 Research Design 16 3.4 Research Methodology 16 3.5 Data Collection 17 3.6 Sources of Data 17 3.7 Data Analysis 18 3.8 Ethical Concerns 18 Chapter IV Findings and Discussions 4.1 Chapter Overview 19 4.2 Agency Theory versus Rent Extraction 19 4.3 Forms of Compensation 19 4.4 Say on Pay 22 4.5 Pay for Performance 23 4.6 Pay Disclosure 24 Chapter V Conclusion and Recommendations 5.1 Conclusion 27 5.2 Recommendation for improving CEO pay 28 5.3 Limitations 29 5.4 Areas for further research 30 References 31 Appendices 34 Chapter I Introduction 1.1 Background Executive pay or chief executive officer (CEO) has come under heavy scrutiny particularly following economic recession and financial turbulen ce. Demand for restricting or regulating CEO pay or the issue of â€Å"fat cats† (Lin, Kuo and Wang, 2013) comes in times of economic crisis (Dittman, Maug and Zhang, 2011). Blinder (2009) refers to the incentives built into the compensation plans of many financial firms as â€Å"perverse† and attributes the financial crises to these â€Å"perverse† incentives (cited in Lin, Kuo and Wang, 2012). CEO pay has received enormous attention not just from the academics but also from the press (Gao, Harford, and Li, 2012). Every other day media reports of the excessively generous pay packages although there are diverse opinions over the pay packages granted to the executives. These arguments suggest that there is little correlation between economic conditions and executive pay. The CEO pay was subject