Bank CEO Incentives and the Global Financial Crisis

2971 Words6 Pages

Fahlenbrach and Stulz (2011) stated that bank CEO incentives can't be answerable for the credit crisis, as their incentives appeared to be aligned with their interest of their shareholders. Find no evidence that they performed better (Fahlenbrach and Stulz 2011). Fahlenbrach & Stulz (2011) discover verification that banks with higher shareholder- management incentive alignment, options holdings or through stock executed worse during the financial crisis. They conclude, “This evidence recommends that CEOs took exposures that they feel were profitable for their shareholders ex ante but that these exposures performed very poorly ex post. Fahlenbrach and Stulz discover no evidence that the incentive arrangement of senior management lead to risk-taking that benefitted themselves at the expense of stakeholders or shareholders in the firms. Instead, they argue that given the important stakes held in their firms by senior management, their long-term interests were suitably aligned to those of the stockholders. Bank with grater- option and larger fraction compensation in bonuses for their CEOs did not perform worse during the crisis. A current study by Fahlenbrach and Stulz (2009) of a sample of bank CEOs reports that base salaries constitute only about 10% of total compensation, and that the wealth of these CEOs increases by an average of about $24 for every $1,000 of shareholder value created. And this, of course, represents a dramatic improvement in the original estimates reported by Jensen and Murphy. Fahlenbrach and Stulz (2011) note that the top five best paid executives in financial services in 2006 were CEOs of Lehman brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill lynch, Morgan Stanley and country Finance. Only one of these companies survived cri...

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...l of Banking and Finance.
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Fahlenbrach, R. and Stulz, R. M., (2011), ‘Bank CEO Incentives and the credit crisis’, Journal of Financial Economics, 99: 11-26.
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