Incentive Compensation and Incentive Regulation: Empirical Evidence

by Carlo Cambini, Sara De Masi and Laura Rondi

This paper examines the relationship between CEO pay and firm performance within a sample of European publicly listed energy utilities from 2000 to 2010, focusing on the differential responses that arise from being subject to different regulatory regimes. In particular, we investigate the difference in pay-performance sensitivity across regulated and unregulated firms as well as the impact of different regulatory schemes – incentive vs. cost-based regulation - on CEO monetary incentives. Using various measures of performance, we find that European energy utilities link CEO compensation to firm performance, but CEO pay-performance is higher for unregulated companies.
When we focus on the effect of alternative regulatory schemes, our results show that payperformance sensitivity is significantly higher for firms under incentive regulation than within firms under cost-based regulation. This result holds after controlling for firm - private vs. state - ownership and for varying degrees of market liberalization across countries.