René M. Stulz's blog

The question of the debate is whether executive compensation contributed to the crisis. Does contribute mean that executive compensation affected the behavior of executives, or does it mean that executive compensation made the crisis significantly worse? If it means that it affected the behavior of executives, surely that is the case. With different compensation schemes, the financial system would have been different and the crisis would have been different. If it means that it made the crisis worse, how could we know that executive pay made the crisis worse? It is an empirical issue and only empirical work can resolve it. Unfortunately, there is very little empirical work so far because it is so difficult to determine ex ante what excessive risk-taking is and data on executive compensation is limited. 

Most of the studies of compensation arrangements in the financial industry look at the named executive officers in banks (i.e., the CEO, CFO, or President) because we have data on the compensation arrangements of these individuals. There has been much conjecture about compensation arrangements of traders in banks, but there is no data and thus no empirical evidence. In addition, even if we had such data, it could not be understood independently of the risk management practices of the institution. To see this, consider a trader: Risk-taking incentives for the trader can be affected by his compensation but also by how his performance is defined. If his funding cost reflects the risks he is taking, his attitude towards risk will be very different from a trader who pays the same cost that his institution pays regardless of the risks he takes. 

Turning to the evidence on compensation arrangements for top executives, the published work is the paper that Rudiger Fahlenbrach and I published in the Journal of Financial Economics and the paper that Lucian Bebchuk published with Alma Cohen and Holger Spamann in the Yale Journal on Regulation. Although I discussed my paper already in my first blog post, it is useful to show how different researchers can draw seemingly contradictory conclusions from the same data.

Conventional wisdom has it that compensation in the financial industry is responsible for much of the credit crisis. For instance, Paul Krugman states that “reforming bankers’ compensation is the single best thing we can do to prevent another financial crisis a few years down the road.” Unfortunately, the facts are stubborn and they do not fit this conventional wisdom.

Rüdiger Fahlenbrach and I study the incentives of bank CEOs before the start of the crisis and how the performance of banks is related to these incentives in a paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics. Our sample includes 95 large banks for which we have detailed information on CEO compensation, option holdings, and equity holdings. The paper shows that the value of the shares held by CEOs in the companies they managed in 2006 was roughly ten times the value of their total annual compensation. Such large holdings dwarfed annual bonuses (see Table 1). Experts in governance would have argued before the crisis that the interests of these CEOs were well aligned with the interests of the shareholders because they had so much skin in the game. The CEOs of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns had equity holdings in their firms worth approximately one billion dollars in 2006. With such holdings, it would have made little sense for CEOs to take actions that knowingly decreased shareholder wealth.