Acharya, Gabarro and Volpin’s Competition for Managers, Corporate Governance and Incentive Compensation has interesting insights and data on both corporate governance and executive compensation debates. In the final analysis, I think it’s most interesting for what it says about the uncorporation. Here’s the abstract:
We propose a model in which firms use corporate governance as part of an optimal compensation scheme: better governance incentivizes managers to perform better and thus saves on the cost of providing pay for performance. However, when managerial talent is scarce, firms compete to attract better managers. This reduces an individual firm’s incentives to invest in corporate governance because managerial rents are determined by the manager’s reservation value when employed elsewhere and thus by other firms’ governance. In equilibrium, better managers end up at firms with weaker governance, and conversely, better-governed firms have lower-quality managers. Consistent with these implications, we show empirically that a firm’s executive compensation is not chosen in isolation but also depends on other firms’ governance and that better managers are matched to firms with weaker corporate governance.
Some particularly interesting points in the paper:
- Pay-for-performance compensation is greater in firms with weaker governance, thus indicating that these are substitutes. Another reminder of the dangers of putting on blinders when evaluating and regulating corporate governance.
- Executive compensation depends not just on a firm’s own governance, but on the governance of the firm’s competitors of comparable size.
- Managerial quality also depends on firm governance. When a firm gets a better CEO, the quality of its governance decreases, and vice versa,
This paper shows that corporate governance and executive compensation are much more complicated not only than regulators’ simplistic assumptions, but even than some leading theories, such as Gabaix & Landier on the effect of firm capitalization (Why Has CEO Pay Increased So Much?, 123 QJE 49 (2008)) and Hermalin & Weisbach on CEO power (Endogenously Chosen Boards of Directors and Their Monitoring of the CEO, 88 American Economic Review 96 (1998)). The authors note that the offsetting effects of governance and managerial quality “may explain why it has proven so hard so far to find direct evidence that corporate governance increases firm performance.”
Of particular interest for my work is this final observation in the paper:
A notable exception is the link between governance and performance found in firms owned by private equity: Private equity ownership features strong corporate governance, high pay-for-performance but also significant CEO co-investment, and superior operating performance. Since private equity funds hold concentrated stakes in firms they own and manage, they internalize better (compared, for example, to dispersed shareholders) the benefits of investing in costly governance. Our model and empirical results can be viewed as providing an explanation for why there exist governance inefficiencies in firms with dispersed shareholders that concentrated private equity investors can “arbitrage” through their investments in active governance.
This is another testament to the governance implications of the uncorporation. For explanations of these implications, see my Rise of the Uncorporation, Chapter 8, and Partnership Governance of Large Firms.
