Based on the principal-agent framework, the present research puts to empirical scrutiny the responsiveness of executive pay to corporate performance in a sample of 209 companies listed on the S&P BSE 500 Index. Both sensitivity and elasticity models have been formulated to measure the strength and magnitude of the pay-performance relationship over the period 2008-09 to 2012-13. Using robust statistical tools, the results of the present study reveal a positive, yet weak strength of such relationship. The stronger responsiveness of pay to accounting-based performance vis-a-vis to market-based performance suggests remedial compensation policies further aligning executive pay to increase in shareholders’ wealth in the sample Indian firms. Future research can explore additional theoretical underpinnings of the pay paradigm.
The study examines the relationship between executive compensation and firm performance among Indian firms. The evidence suggests that firm performance measured by accounting, as well as market-based measures, significantly affects executive compensation. We also test for the presence of persistence in executive compensation by employing the system-generalised methods of moments (GMM) estimator. We find significant persistence in executive compensation among the sample firms. Further, we report the absence of pay–performance relationship among the smaller sample firms and business group affiliated firms. Thus, our findings cast doubts over the performance-based executive compensation practices of Indian business group affiliated firms.
It is not clear whether attention is necessary or not for consciousness. We studied the relationship between attention and consciousness by tracking their electrophysiological correlates. The participants attended to visual targets, ignored nontargets in the prespecified visual field and ignored all stimuli in the opposite field. Visual consciousness was varied by masking. Our results showed that the earliest electrophysiological correlate of consciousness emerged independent of the manipulations of spatial and nonspatial attention. Conversely, the electrophysiological correlate of attention, selection negativity, was elicited regardless of the presence or absence of consciousness. Only the correlates of later, higher-level conscious processes strongly depended on attention. Thus, the electrophysiological brain responses reflecting visual consciousness and attention are initially independent of each other.