Carol Bowie is Executive Director at ISS. An ISS white paper detailing the methodology discussed below is available here.
Escalating CEO pay packages in the last few decades have stirred much debate, culminating in mandated advisory shareholder votes on executive compensation under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. The first year of widespread “say-on-pay” votes in the U.S. suggests that investors are taking a conservative approach – about 40 proposals at Russell 3000 index companies received less than majority support from votes cast for and against, and fewer than 200 received support from less than 70 percent. The advent of say on pay in the U.S. has highlighted pay-for-performance as the most significant factor driving investors’ voting decisions on the issue, however.
Doubts about the strength of pay and performance alignment arise from perceptions of “agency problem” conflicts of interest, weak board oversight and aggressive pay benchmarking; from demonstrated abuses such as options backdating; and most recently, from concern that pay practices at some firms likely contributed to the financial meltdown that triggered the latest economic and market malaise. Further, while executive pay has increased at a fairly rapid pace since the 1980s, investor portfolios have experienced multiple market swings – booms and busts that often appear disconnected from individual executives’ impact — adding to skepticism about long-term pay and performance alignment.
