Research On The Impact Of Media Coverage On Executive Compensation

Executive compensation has always been a hot issue in theoretical and practical areas. Every year, after the disclosure of the annual report on executive compensation of listing Corporations, it arouses widespread concern. By reading media reports on executive compensation, the author found that most of the media reports focused on the excessive absolute amount of executive compensation. These reports attached importance to the mismatching of the changing trend of executive compensation, company performance and stock price, the large salary gap between executive and grass-roots staff, the inconsistent of dividend policy and the executive compensation. Moreover, the issues of "zero executive compensation" is rarely reported. It reveals that most of the reported listing Corporations have the problem of high executive pay. Most of these reports are essentially skeptical of the compensation governance. Executive compensation issue is not only a governance issue but also a matter of social fairness and justice.Now, most of existing research on executive compensation is from the point of internal corporate governance. From the view of media coverage is a relatively new perspective. The domestic and foreign scholars believe that there exists the administrative mechanism and reputation mechanism.but considering the large proportion of state-owned economy and undeveloped managerial labor market, some domestic scholars generally ignore the dominant role of administrative mechanism. This paper believes that the compensation mechanism of executives cannot simply rely on a system arrangement to solve, the effect of reputation should be taken seriously.By reading the report on executive payments from 2009 to 2013 in CNKI net, we get 395 samples. Through empirical testing, we found that the media coverage is higher, the level of executive pay compared to the previous year decreased. But the negative media reports more, executive pay levels decreased. More coverage to official media, executive pay levels decreased has not been verified. Then, using executives and listing corporation reputation as a proxy variable data, we confirm that reputation concerns played a mediating effect on executive compensation in the media.