Sustainable Corporations in Non-Financial Sectors Through Optimal Design of Executive Pay

Abstract

It is commonplace in current legal scholarship that pay packages for executives that were not tied to the impact of these executives' policies on shareholder wealth maximization often caused harm to shareholder interests and their companies, especially in the long term. The no-pay-without-performance postulate is as old as the first global economic crisis of the 20thcentury – the deep depression. Since then, this postulate has been repeated and substantiated innumerous times by the majority of experts in corporate law and business economics, but without real success. There are, however, commentators who deny the existence of a link between skewed incentive pay, excessive risk-taking, and financial losses. They instead insist on the superiority of the traditional director-centric model of corporate governance, which would allegedly preserve the balance that has generally worked well between the limited role and limited liability of shareholders and the active role, fiduciary duties, and potential liability of managers, which allegedly renders additional executive pay regulation unnecessary.