31 July, 2021

Why modesty is king when it comes to CEO remuneration

While executive pay may be perceived by many to be about scale, new research finds that less may well be more; indeed, the best-performing companies have been found to pay their CEOs relatively less than others.

Pay inequality, remuneration, executive pay, performance pay, executive rewards

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Vlerick Business School has developed a “rich” database, fed every year with data on all aspects of CEO remuneration (for example, remuneration level, remuneration structures, typology of long-term incentives, and key performance indicators) in listed firms in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden. In the last edition, we were especially interested to find out which strategies underly executive remuneration in the best-performing firms (with sustained performance being operationalised as a significantly higher return on assets over a seven-year timeframe, compared with companies in the same industry).

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board performance, CEO remuneration, Executive pay, long-term incentives, Vlerick Business School, Winter 2017