高管外部薪酬差距的激励扭曲效应——以企业违规为例的研究

The Incentive Distortion Effect of Executive External Pay Gap:Evidence from the Enterprise Violation

薪酬激励是解释现代组织决策的重要因素,薪酬的分化将导致企业管理层决策的一系列调整。本文基于锦标赛理论、社会比较理论论证了管理层薪酬攀比下的激励扭曲效应,并以沪深A股的民营上市公司样本为例,检验了企业间的外部薪酬差距如何影响企业的违规决策行为。结果表明:总体上,外部薪酬差距显著加剧了企业违规的可能性,即存在激励的扭曲效应;机制上,薪酬差距将导致企业出现更多的在职消费、掏空行为、关联交易以及盈余管理,表明激励扭曲下企业管理层可能通过其他渠道补偿自身的回报,以及采取不正当竞争方式提高企业业绩;对策上,内部控制质量、管理层持股因素均发挥着显著的调节效应,能够改善薪酬差距的激励扭曲。上述研究结论有助于理解企业管理层在外部薪酬差距驱动下的违规决策机制,为完善上市公司的外部监管与治理企业机会主义行为提供有益的政策启示。

The sustained development of China's economy has brought about significant progress in enterprise efficiency,and has also led to a larger gap in factor returns,further triggering incentive distortions.Clarifying the driving force and related mechanisms of opportunism in corporate management is of great policy significance for improving the external regulatory system of listed companies and building a fair competitive market environment.This article uses non-financial and non-real estate private listed companies from 2012 to 2018 as research samples to classify the salary distribution of enterprise management from an industry level perspective,and obtains the external pay gap indicator for the executives of listed companies,which is used to construct the incentive level faced by the management.Further construct a Logit estimation model to examine the impact of pay gaps on corporate violations and related impact mechanisms.This article finds that,firstly,compared to the median level in the industry,the lower the compensation of management,the significantly higher the probability of corporate violations.The results remain unchanged under endogeneity and heterogeneity tests,indicating that there is an incentive distortion mechanism in the pay gap,prompting management to be more inclined to choose non-compliant behavior driven by the goal of accelerating enterprise growth or meeting their own salary returns.Second,a KHB mediating effect model is constructed to examine the ways in which the pay gap affects violations.It is found that the pay gap promotes management to have more serious on-the-job consumption,related party transaction,tunneling behavior and earnings management,which further aggravates various opportunistic behaviors such as unfair competition,financial fraud and infringement of equity rights and interests.Among them,the proportion of indirect effects of on-the-job consumption and related party transaction is higher than tunneling behavior and earnings management,which is an important way for the incentive effect of pay gap.Thirdly,from the perspective of internal control and equity incentive,this paper discusses the countermeasures to restrain the distortion of compensation gap incentive.The test results show that the increase of management's shareholding ratio can significantly reduce the violations caused by the compensation gap,which indicates that equity incentive can not only indirectly improve the compensation return of management,but also realize the binding of interests between shareholders and management,reducing the occurrence of violations.The improvement of internal control quality has significantly suppressed the violation of pay gap.Due to the improvement of internal control system,mutual restraint and adjustment within the enterprise have been achieved,directly increasing the opportunity cost of implementing violations and significantly reducing the tendency of enterprises to violate regulations.An important implication of this article is that external pay gaps can lead to incentive distortion,leading to opportunistic behavior among corporate management,expanding research evidence in the field of salary incentives and corporate decision-making.In addition,research has found that strengthening internal governance and equity incentives are beneficial for correcting distortion in salary incentives,providing policy inspiration for strengthening the quality and efficiency of illegal governance,creating a fair and competitive market environment,and building a competitive and orderly high standard market.