Why does the boss rake in obscene amounts of money while the rest of us toil for what feels like little reward? Apparently it's for your own good.That's the line of economists when they...

Investor activists are making the most of the push for "say on pay" proposals, where they get an annual, non-binding vote on the compensation of top executives, with more than 90 U.S....

Absolutely disgusting! Chief executive officers, the group representing the most spoiled and richest section of society, are getting tax gross-ups.A Corporate Library study found that one in five US...

Directors and institutional investors don't agree on whether the executive pay system has produced better performance. But they do agree on one key point: it's resulted in CEOs getting paid...

Donations to charity are tax deductible. But what if they are in the form of backdated stock gifts?That seems to be the case in a new study from New York University finance professor David Yermack,...

In the past, I have talked about the appalling bonuses and huge pay packets handed out rewarding failure in the subprime crisis. Some examples here, here, here and here.But according to Nell Minnow,...

Here's a note to CEOs: do you think you're paid too much? Some of the people on your board do.That seems to be the suggestion in a Heidrick & Struggles survey which showed that one in...

At the end of last year, I did a blog entry looking at how investment bankers were still raking in enormous bonuses, despite the subprime meltdown. Indeed, according to research at Breaking Views,...

Bonuses might be down but the subprime mess has not stopped the party on Wall Street.True, some are "doing it hard". After Morgan Stanley, for example, announced it would write down its...

The media spends a lot of time bagging CEOs for outrageous salaries and perks. But a recent study suggests the media might be just as much to blame.The study by University of Colorado researchers,...

Interesting post last week from Herb Greenberg at Seeking Alpha on whether Wall Street should hand back its bonuses to subprime victims."During my Power Lunch stint on CNBC yesterday, one of the...

Last week, I talked about Merrill Lynch's appalling reward for failure when it sent former chief executive Stanley O'Neal with $160 million-plus in handouts after plunging the bank into its...

Hat tip to Broc Romanek's CorporateCounsel.net blog for alerting us to the trend in lawyers' pay. Not quite hedge fund manager territory but impressive nonetheless.Just three years out of law...

Merrill Lynch has shown the world that it's possible to get rich from failure, at least on Wall Street, with its announcement yesterday that after a loss of $2.2 billion last quarter following an...

Loading up CEOs with options leads to riskier performance, according to new research.A study, Swinging for the fences: the effects of CEO stock options on company risk-taking and performance , found...

Corporations are not really doing that well when it comes to explaining to investors how executives are compensated and what exactly they have to do to earn their bucks, says the Securities and...

How much do hedge fund managers make? A lot more than ordinary folk.According to a new study, the top 20 private equity and hedge fund managers pocketed an average $657.5 million, or 22,255 times the...

Earlier this year, I talked about how the money sloshing into London has created a new class of bankers and traders: the haves and the have-yachts.But US bankers and traders haven't exactly been...

Now that the Justice Department got its first backdating scalp in Brocade Communications System's former CEO Gregory Reyes, the Securities and Exchange Commission has now targeted company's...