The Road to Riches: CEO Incentives and Firm Performance

Abstract

CEO flow incentives, both stock options and bonuses, are positively related to measures of firm market valuation and operating performance suggesting incentives are an important mechanism to align CEO interests with shareholders. These findings are robust to alternative measures of firm valuation and operating performance. They are also persistent across various estimation techniques such as pooled OLS with clustered standard errors, firm random effects, and firm fixed effects and also after accounting for potential endogeneity between compensation and firm performance as well as firm heterogeneity. Providing CEOs with increased equity and bonus incentives is the "road to riches" for owners of a firm.