Title: Taking the Blue Pill: The Imponderable Impact of Executive Compensation Reform
Abstract:No corporate governance issue captures the imagination and frustration of the American public and politicians more than executive compensation. Despite decades of varied responses to address soaring e...No corporate governance issue captures the imagination and frustration of the American public and politicians more than executive compensation. Despite decades of varied responses to address soaring executive compensation such as tax measures, board independence requirements, and mandated disclosures, executive compensation levels continue to soar, as does the saliency of executive compensation as a political issue. Most of the legal literature on executive compensation has focused on the conduct of wayward managers. This Article, however, examines the impact of political behavior (that is, lawmaker opportunism) on executive compensation reform. For lawmakers, executive compensation reform operates as a blue pill—a mechanism for lawmaker diversion and responsibility-shifting that diverts corporate constituent and scholarly attention away from more important corporate governance and socio-economic issues. This scenario threatens the prospect of optimal reform. Executive compensation reform is analogous to a service exhibiting credence characteristics. Credence characteristics are service attributes whose quality cannot be fully determined even after significant use. Examples of services with substantial credence characteristics include automobile repair services, medical treatments, and corporate law. In the corporate law context, corporate lawmakers—for example, the state of Delaware and the federal government—not only provide reform services, but also act as experts and diagnose corporate governance problems. Information asymmetries between lawmakers and various corporate constituencies (for example, managers, shareholders, and populist groups) create perverse incentives for opportunistic lawmaker behavior. The unobservable impact of executive compensation reform provides lawmakers with added discretion that is often used * 2008 Assistant Professor of Law, Wake Forest University School of Law. B.A., 1996, Wake Forest University; J.D., 1999, University of Pennsylvania; LL.M., 2001, University of Cambridge, Pembroke College. I am grateful to Alan Palmiter, Christopher Pietrusziewicz, Danielle Holley-Walker, N. Jeremi Duru, and Kami Chavis Simmons for reviewing drafts of this Article and offering their insightful comments. Any errors herein are my own. I wish to thank Eric Pikus and Sidney Shapiro for their valuable insights; Sally Irvin, Gregory Kupka, Amy Willis, Meredith Pinson, and Azaria Tesfa for their valuable research assistance; and Wake Forest University School of Law for its generous support. I would also like to thank my daughters, Zoe and Sydney, for their inspiration.Read More
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 35
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