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, 10 Jul 2026 15:34:39 +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 Realizable Pay: Insights into Performance Alignment – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Realizable Pay: Insights into Performance Alignment https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/04/29/realizable-pay-insights-into-performance-alignment/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=realizable-pay-insights-into-performance-alignment https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/04/29/realizable-pay-insights-into-performance-alignment/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2019 13:52:50 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=117984?d=20190429095250EDT Posted by Kosmas Papadopoulos and John Roe, ISS Analytics, on Monday, April 29, 2019
Editor's Note:

Kosmas Papadopoulos is Managing Editor and Executive Director with ISS Analytics, the data intelligence arm of Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc., and John Roe is Head of ISS Analytics. This post is based on an ISS Analytics memorandum by Mr. Papadopoulos and Mr. Roe. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance 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.

How much compensation does a CEO really end up with? It’s a tough question to answer—the summary compensation table is often cited as what the CEO is paid, but the ultimate value that an executive realized from those grants can differ significantly from the amounts disclosed.

For years, companies have recognized this potential discrepancy; since even before the advent of say-on-pay, companies in perilous performance positions have turned to alternative measures of pay to demonstrate that executives have shared in the pain that investors feel in their portfolio values. These alternatives have included various forms of realizable and realized pay. An early example includes the disclosure below made at least six years ago, which still reflects the types of disclosures we see today:

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