New Vs. Old Economy: Trends and Determinants of Executive Compensation

Abstract

We analyzed the executive compensation in the new and old economy in the period between 1992 to 2005. We focused on the evolution of the compensation and the factors that explain the executive compensation and if the form of compensation changed after the Nasdaq crash and the Sarbanes-Oxley act. Our results reveal that the new economy executives received, on average, much more than executives from the old economy from 1992 to 2003, but after 2004 the mean difference is very small and not statistically significant. In terms of compensation components, old economy executives always received more salary than new economy executives, and between 1992 to 2000, new economy executives received more bonus than old economy executives, but after this year the situation changes. We also found that the crash of Nasdaq and the Sarbanes Oxley act affected in a different way the executive compensation from new and old economy. In the case of the new economy, executives are changing from stock options based compensation to restricted stocks, and in the case of the old economy, they are changing to bonuses. We also investigated the impact of corporate governance and financial variables on new and old economy CEOs' and Directors' compensation and found evidence that the percentage of stock options that are vested but not exercised, size of the firm, the percentage of firm stocks owned by the executive, volatility, closing price of the company stock for the calendar year, one year total return to shareholders, number of board meetings, age as CEO and the ROA are variables that play important roles in explaining CEO and Director compensation. We also found that these factors are not all the same when we explain CEO and directors compensation from new and old economy and, in the case of the variables that are the same the intensity of the coefficients is different and generally statistically significant