激励水平、约束机制与上市公司股权激励计划

Incentive Level, Monitoring Mechanism, and Equity Incentive Plan in China’s Listed Companies

本文从激励水平和约束机制两个方面研究了上市公司推行股权激励计划意愿的影响因素。研究发现,虽然无论是国有企业还是民营企业,率先实施股权激励计划的企业都比同类的其它企业具有显著更高的已有激励水平,但是国有企业实施股权激励计划的意愿与管理层约束机制显著负相关,而民营企业的情况则恰好相反。本文的研究表明,国有企业的股权激励计划符合"管理层权力论",是管理层利用自身权利寻租的表现,而民营企业的股权激励计划则符合"最优契约论",是对管理层的有效激励。

Equity incentive plans connect executives＇ benefits and shareholders＇ wealth more tightly, and encourage manage- ment taking risks. As a result, it has become the most popular and important form of executive compensation in many advanced economies. In China, it is a relatively new form of executive com- pensation. More and more listed companies began to initiate such plans after the regulation about equity incentive plan was enacted in 2006. Meanwhile, there are some critics about the equity in- centive plans of some listed companies in mass medias. With the special institutional background, whether equity incentive plans alleviate agency costs between shareholders and management is an important question. Answer to this question would help us evalu- ate the effects of such plans, and give us clues on the improvement of regulations toward equity incentive plans. There are two points of views with regard to the effect of equity incentive plans in lit- erature. Efficient contract theory takes equity incentive plan as an efficient way of mitigating the agency problems between share- holders and management, whereas management power theory ar- gues that managers dominate the contracting process of executive compensation, and hence equity incentive plan is a consequence of management power instead of a measure to lower the agency cost between shareholders and management. From the viewpoint of corporate governance including existing incentive level and monitoring mechanism, this paper studies the factors influencing the initiation of equity incentive plan in China＇s listed companies. It is found that for both SOEs and private firms, companies with higher existing incentive level are more inclined to initiate equity incentive plan. However, the likelihood of initiating equity incen- tive plan in SOEs is significantly negatively correlated with man- agement monitoring mechanism, whereas in private firms, this relationship is positive. Our results show that managers in SOEs initiate equity incentive plan to grab shareholders. On the con- trary, equity incentive plans in private firms are efficient contract alleviating shareholder-manager agency problems.