Executive Excess Compensation And Corporate Social Responsibility

In recent years,the high level of executive pay and the problem of excessive pay appear frequently,which cause the concern of the public and relevant government departments.There are a lot of risks and negative effects for executives,and executives are actively exploring ways to justify their compensation.With the continuous development of our country,people pay more and more attention to the issue of corporate social responsibility.Corporate social responsibility can help enterprises establish a good image and transmit positive signals to the market.The motivation of corporate social responsibility has become one of the hot issues.However,as the decision-maker and executor of corporate social responsibility,whether executives will promote the performance of corporate social responsibility out of the self-interest motivation of defending their own excess pay has not been studied in depth.From the perspective of compensation defense,this paper takes the listed companies that issued the social responsibility report in 2009-2017 as the research sample to explore whether the executives will defend the excess compensation by improving the performance of corporate social responsibility when they get more excess compensation.The results show that there is a significant positive correlation between executive compensation and corporate social responsibility.Compared with non-state-owned enterprises,there is a stronger positive correlation between the excess compensation of state-owned enterprises’ executives and corporate social responsibility,which indicates that the problem of excess compensation of state-owned enterprises’ executives will face more supervision and doubt,the risk and negative effect of excess compensation are greater,the demand for defense is stronger,and they are more inclined to defend through corporate social responsibility.Compared with the state-owned enterprises with higher compensation performance sensitivity,the positive correlation between the executives’ excess compensation and corporate social responsibility is stronger,which shows that when the executives cannot use the improvement of performance to defend their own excess compensation,the demand and pressure of compensation defense is greater,and they are more inclined to defend compensation through social responsibility.Compared with the state-owned enterprises with weak external supervision,the positive correlation between the excess compensation and corporate social responsibility of the state-owned enterprises with strong external supervision is stronger,which shows that when the executives face more attention and public pressure,the defense pressure is greater,and they are more inclined to defend compensation through social responsibility.This paper provides an empirical evidence for executives to defend their own excess pay by improving the performance of corporate social responsibility.It not only enriches the relevant research on the defense way of executives’ excess pay,but also reveals that there is a certain self-interest motivation in the behavior of executives to improve the performance of corporate social responsibility.