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Justifying CEO Pay Ratios: Analysing Corporate Responses to Bloomberg’s Listing of Standard & Poor’s 500 Pay Ratios

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Dimensional Corporate Governance

Part of the book series: CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance ((CSEG))

Abstract

This study analyzes Standard & Poor’s 500 Index top 250 companies’ responses to Bloomberg’s disclosed calculations of CEO pay ratios. The results suggest that CEO pay ratios, CEO compensations and average worker compensations do not seem to be related to the decision to respond. They also indicate that many of the corporations have adopted a strategy of avoiding the issue or deflecting attention from it by either choosing not to respond or criticizing the technicalities of the calculation of the CEO pay ratios. Corporations that responded largely conceptualize and communicate the rationale for high executive compensation in performance-driven language.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Centre on Accounting and Taxation, Observatory of Economics and Management of Fraud (OBEGEF), Faculty of Economics, University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-464, Porto, Portugal

    Manuel Castelo Branco

  2. LIAAD/INESC-TEC, Faculty of Economics, University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-464, Porto, Portugal

    Catarina Delgado

Authors
  1. Manuel Castelo Branco
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  2. Catarina Delgado
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Correspondence to Manuel Castelo Branco .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Business, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

    Nicholas Capaldi

  2. Guildhall Faculty of Business and Law, London Metropolitan University, London, United Kingdom

    Samuel O. Idowu

  3. Cologne Business School, Cologne, Germany

    René Schmidpeter

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Branco, M.C., Delgado, C. (2017). Justifying CEO Pay Ratios: Analysing Corporate Responses to Bloomberg’s Listing of Standard & Poor’s 500 Pay Ratios. In: Capaldi, N., Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R. (eds) Dimensional Corporate Governance. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56182-0_2

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