高管团队薪酬差距对企业风险承担的影响研究

Research on the impact of the executive team pay gap on enterprise risk taking

风险承担水平的提升对增强企业竞争力以及实现高质量发展目标至关重要,而管理者作为决策主体,其薪酬激励契约的设计与风险承担水平密切相关。选取2007—2020年中国A股上市公司数据,实证分析高管团队薪酬差距对企业风险承担的影响及作用机制。研究表明:(1)企业高管团队薪酬差距对企业风险承担水平的提高具有显著正向影响,企业研发投入在二者之间承担着部分中介效用。(2)与国有、成熟期企业相比,薪酬差距对风险承担水平的正向影响在非国有以及成长期企业中表现得更为明显。从薪酬契约视角的研究拓展了企业风险承担动因相关研究领域,为企业薪酬契约优化、激励效果提升提供了决策参考。

The improvement of risk taking level is crucial to enhancing the competitiveness of enterprises and achieving the goal of high-quality development.Managers are decision-making subjects.Under the principal-agent framework,compensation contracts,as an important means to alleviate agency conflicts between management and shareholders,are closely related to the level of risk taking.When the compensation contract fails,there will be serious principal-agent problems between the management and shareholders,which may induce managers to avoid taking risks so as to reduce the potential risks of decision-making errors and personal reputation compensation damage caused by high-risk decisions.Therefore,how to set up an appropriate salary gap between the management team,guide the management team to enhance their willingness to take risks and realize the incentive compatibility between the management team and the overall interests of an enterprise are not only important topics in the field of corporate governance,but also key issues to be faced with in the optimization of a compensation incentive contract and the improvement of incentive effect in practice.Many scholars conduct studies on the incentive effect of widening the pay gap of senior executives,but they still have not yet reached a consensus.The existing studies have discussed the micro-economic consequences of the pay gap from aspects of corporate performance,investment and innovation,but few investigated the correlation between the pay gap of senior executives and corporate risk taking.In terms of the research on the motivation of corporate risk taking,the existing studies have tried to investigate the influence of the characteristics of executive compensation contracts on corporate risk taking from the perspective of employee shareholding and equity incentive,but there is still a lack of research on the internal motivation of corporate risk taking and its transmission mechanism from the perspective of the executive team pay gap.This paper takes China’s listed companies from 2007 to 2020 as the research samples to empirically test the impact of the executive team pay gap on the level of corporate risk taking and its mechanism.The findings are as follows:(1)The executive team salary gap significantly promotes the level of enterprise risk taking.(2)Compared with state-owned and mature enterprises,the executive team pay gap has a more significant positive impact on the risk taking level of non-state-owned,growing and declining enterprises.(3)R&D investment plays a partially mediating role in the process where the executive team pay gap affects the level of enterprise risk taking.Based on the research conclusions,this paper puts forward three policy implications:(1)Full attention should be paid to the incentive effect of the pay gap of the senior management team.(2)Enterprises should consider their own life cycle stage when constructing a reasonable compensation system.(3)State-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises should design different salary design systems.In contrast with the existing literature,this paper expands its research on the micro-economic consequences of executive compensation incentives from the perspective of the risk taking level,and examines the mediating role of R&D investment on the relationship between the executive team pay gap and corporate risk taking.The conclusions of this paper have important reference to optimizing the design of executive team compensation contracts and improving the level of risk taking in practice.