Intellectual capital performance and cash-based incentive payments for executive directors: impact of remuneration committee and corporate governance features

Abstract

We use a sample of 964 executive directors representing 354 Singapore publicly listed firms to examine linkage between firm performance and cash-based bonus payments. As a pooled OLS regression model may hide different models that characterize subsets of observations we use latent class analysis to further examine the data and to identify more specifically the influence of corporate governance features. Our latent class analysis results indicate that remuneration committees with members having their interests better aligned with shareholders (such as presence of a significant owner) appear more likely to consider the incremental value of tying executive director compensation to intellectual capital performance. Remuneration committees with a lower risk of influence from managerial power were also found to be more likely to support a compensation linkage for executive directors to intellectual capital performance. The influence of the remuneration committee features is evident for both entrepreneurial and traditional firms. Overall, our findings are consistent with both the optimal-contract pricing and managerial power views of executive compensation setting.