Executive compensation

アメリカのサブプライム問題にともなって、金融機関のトップの責任とトップの報酬が問題となっている。経営者への過大な成功報酬が、過大なリスクテイク行動に経営者を走らせるのではないかという議論があるが、これに関して、ベッカーは、次のように書いている。
今回の住宅バブルの問題に対して、経営者が過大なリスクをとったのは、principal-agent problemによるものではない。その証拠に未公開企業でも同様の行動をとっている。
ドットコムバブルの時は、過大なストックオプション報酬に対するインセンティブが問題だったといわれるが、これは異常に高いPERから考えて、リスクテイクしているのは経営者ではなく株主だった。
結論としては、いわゆる経営者の過大な報酬が、株主が期待する以上のリスクテイクのインセンティブになったという説得的な根拠はないとしている。
 

Risk-Taking by Top Executives-Becker
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
・Evidence suggesting that the risk taken by companies during the recent boom was not mainly due to a principal-agent problem between executives and stockholders is that the major private equity firms also experienced serious loses on their investments, especially on their housing investments.

・Private equity companies have much less of a principal-agent problem than do Citicorp, Bears Sterns and other publicly traded companies because private equity companies have a concentrated ownership.
・Also borrowers in the residential housing market have basically no principal-agent problems since they buy for themselves; yet many of them too took on excessive risk because of undo optimism about the housing market.
・Another test of the excessive risk argument is whether the trend toward greater compensation in the form of stock options and other performance contingent compensation increased the risk taking of companies.
・Some have attributed much of the dot-com bubble to increased performance based compensation. However, most dot-com companies that went under were quite small and rather closely held by venture capitalists and similar investors.
・Hence these companies did not have a sharp conflict between stockholders and managers. Moreover, during the dot-com bubble, assets of minor Internet companies were raised in market value to more than 100 times earnings, even when they had no sales, let alone earnings. Such huge earnings-profits ratios suggest excessive risk taking by stockholders more than by managers.
・Economic theory does imply that the increasing trend toward performance-based compensation would increase the degree of risk-taking by top executives.
・ It is also unclear if CEOs have been induced to take more risks than the level of risk desired by stockholders.
・Furthermore, and most important, there is no persuasive evidence that the structure of CEO compensation played an important roll in either the dot-com or housing bubbles.