How to get managers’ incentives right

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In the corporate world, some say, fear plays as big a part as greed in distorting manager incentives

The biblical story is an early example of the principal-agent problem. When delegating authority, how can a principal be sure that their agents will act responsibly? The problem is usually discussed in terms of the potential for the agents to be greedy, and take money for themselves. The unfortunate servant in the parable acts out of fear, declaring: “Master, I knew you to be a hard man.

Companies have several layers of agents. The board is worried about pressure from fund managers who are themselves acting on behalf of the underlying investors, and fear losing clients if they do not deliver above-average returns. Mr Bebchuk says this short-termism “bogeyman” has been enlisted to argue in favour of insulating managers from shareholder control using restricted voting rights, special shares and the rest. Some think executives may be constrained by the concentration of ownership in a few institutional hands, as the fund-management industry consolidates. Mr Bebchuk believes it is foolish to think back to a “golden era” when share ownership was dispersed.

To examine the effect of incentives, Xavier Baeten, a professor at the Vlerick Business School in Belgium, studied the Stoxx Europe 600 index of big European companies between 2014 and 2019. When he compared individual firms’ returns on assets with the chief executives’ remuneration, he found a positive impact of high pay on performance over the short term, defined as the next 12 months. Yet no such relationship showed up over a three-year period, implying that the initial gains soon dissipated.

 

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I liked how you used the Biblical examples of the parable of the talents in this we'll written piece :)

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