高管人力资本溢价与企业绩效倒U型关系研究

The Inverted U-shaped Relationship Between Human Capital Premium And Corporate Performance

高管薪酬攀升引发了大量的争论与学术研究，其中高管人力资本收益与企业绩效是否存在相关性是争论的焦点之一。本文以1999—2012年我国上市公司高管为研究对象，运用回归法将高管薪酬分解为人力资本收益和人力资本溢价两部分，分别探讨其与企业绩效的相关性。研究表明，人力资本溢价比人力资本收益对高管更具激励效用，且与企业绩效呈倒U型关系。人力资本溢价对企业绩效的影响分为负激励、有效激励和过度激励三个阶段，其中，有效激励区间处于人力资本溢价10％～90％分位数所对应的金额之间。我国上市公司中约有三分之二的行业高管获得有效激励，近三分之一的行业高管激励不足，而金融证券业和少量房产业高管则激励过度。本文的贡献在于，发现人力资本溢价与企业绩效呈倒U型关系，人力资本溢价对企业绩效的促进作用存在有效区间。这些研究对我国企业高管薪酬的评价与设计具有现实意义。

The rising compensation for executives has triggered a lot of debate as well as academic research, a- mong which the relationship between executives＇ human capital returns and corporate performance is one of the most intense discussed topics. Dow and Raposo （ 2005 ） , Gayle and Miller （2009） , Hall and Murphy （ 2003 ） , Jensen, Murphy and Wruck （2004） , and many other scholars have done much in-depth and meticulous research in this field, but there has still not emerged a widely accepted conclusion on the topic. However,in this study we do not in- tend to repeat the predecessors＇ research method. We suggest that it is not reasonable to take executives＇ pay as a whole as a proxy variable to test the correlation between corporate performance and executives＇ pay. Because executives＇ compensation can be separated into a necessary income,which is related to the human capital stock, and into the＂ premium＂, which is related to business performance improvements and other factors. The former is the ideal human capital return, that is, as long as the employee＇s human capital stock is the same, no matter which department he enters, his earnings should be the same and not be related to the performance of the company. While the latter is probably related to corporate performance improvements. To test our hypothesis, we study the compensation of senior executives in listed Chinese companies over the pe- riod from 1999 to 2012. We use the regression method to separate executive pay into two elements：human capital re- turns and human capital premium. After that, we investigate the correlation of these two parts with the corporate per- formance. The results show that human capital premium is a more attractive incentive for executives to improve en- terprise performance than human capital returns and it is also the key reason why this kind of incentive mechanism works. At the same time, the empirical results also suggest that the human capital premium has an inverted u-shaped relation with enterprise performance. Increasing the premium will encourage executives to put more time and energy into work, in order to improve the performance of the company. But if the premium reaches a certain level, company performance will fall due to the diminishing marginal benefit. This u-shaped relationship remains valid even control- ling for industry heterogeneity and possible endogenous problems. In order to further analyze the impact of human capital premium on the business performance, this article di- vides the samples into 6 sub-samples according to different human capital premium percentiles （ that is 10% ,25% , 50% ,75% and 90% percentile） and discusses how the enterprise performance changes with a varying human cap- ital premium. The empirical results show that the human capital premium can be divided into 3 parts：negative in- centives, effective incentives and excessive incentives. If the human capital premium quantile varies within （0, 10% ） , improving the human capital premium can only alleviate grossly undervalued human capital gains, but is un- able to improve enterprise performance. When the human capital premium quantile varies within （10% ,90% ） ,in- creasing human capital premium will cause improvements in enterprise performance. When the human capital premi- um quantile varies within （90% , 100% ） business performance gets worse as the human capital premium increa- ses. By comparing each industry＇s average human capital premium with its corresponding effective incentive inter- val, we find that there are huge differences between industries. Executives in the financial industry fall into the ex- cessive incentive interval, while executives in manufacturing, textile etc lack incentives. About one third of the com- panies do not give enough incentives, which illustrates that a large proportion of executives in China is undervalued, which may also be an important reason for embezzlement and corruption. Our paper contributes to a growing number of studies on the corperate performance and executives＇ pay. We find that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between human capital premium and enterprise performance, as well as that there exists effective interval for human capital premium promoting enterprise performance. These results are very useful to executives＇ salary design in listed companies.