EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION RESEARCH: A BRIEF REVIEW

摘要

The separation of ownership and control resulted in agency problem. In order to motivate corporate executives, the owners have to design rational compensation system. The question how to determine executive compensation and how to explain some phenomena of executive compensation has caused an intense debate among economists, accountants, psychologists, human resource specialists and strategic planners for 70 years, and the debate tends to continue. In early stage, agency theory, the mainstream school on the issue, focused on pay-performance sensitivity. Their empirical researches usually didn't find the high correlation between compensation and performance. Lately, human capital school, labor market school and "firm organization" school have improved managerial compensation theory from the aspects of executive human capital, executive market and firm characters. They indicated that executive compensation is separately determined by executive human capital, executive position, executive job character, executive labor market, corporate governance, corporate strategy and corporate character. On the basis of the review, this paper points that future research should pay more attention to the integration of the various theories and construct a synthetical model of executive compensation to drive the field.