The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Fri, 19 Jun 2026 11:32:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Is Executive Pay Broken? – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Is Executive Pay Broken? https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/04/13/is-executive-pay-broken/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=is-executive-pay-broken https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/04/13/is-executive-pay-broken/#comments Thu, 13 Apr 2017 13:05:53 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=83334?d=20170413090553EDT Posted by Rupal Patel and David Ellis, EY, on Thursday, April 13, 2017
Editor's Note:

Rupal Patel and David Ellis are partners at EY. This post is based on an EY publication by Ms. Patel and Mr. Ellis. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance about CEO pay includes Paying for Long-Term Performance (discussed on the Forum here) and the book Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation, both by Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried.

In recent months executive pay has received an unprecedented level of attention from a wide range of stakeholders. While Remuneration Committees, executives and investors in many businesses may feel that current pay structures are working well and fit for purpose, the intensity of noise we are experiencing tells us that it is no longer reasonable for any organisation to assume that there is nothing it needs to be concerned about.

First indications from the 2017 AGM season show that in many cases the noise in the system is now turning into real opposition. Many would seek to explain away this opposition as being specific to a business, or focussed on a discrete issue. We at EY believe that this is now wishful thinking.

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