Tag: Equilar

As proxy season ends, Equilar dives into pay-ratio data

With over 2,000 companies now having reported pay-ratio information for the 2018 proxy season (through May 10), consultant Equilar says it’s time to take a deep dive into the data to see what trends are discernible.   Of course, until we have information for several proxy seasons, we really won’t have a very good handle on best practices or even which standards will ultimately take hold. In the meantime, however, Equilar’s analysis of the first year of reporting is a welcome beginning.

Want a preview of pay-ratio disclosure? Equilar releases pay-ratio survey data

Equilar has just released the results of an anonymous survey of public companies, with 356 respondents, which asked these companies to indicate the CEO-employee pay ratios they anticipated reporting in their 2018 proxy statements.  As you would expect, there was a lot of variation among companies based on industry, market cap, revenue, workforce size and geography. In addition,  because the rule provided significant flexibility in how companies could identify the median employee and in how they calculate his or her total annual compensation, variations in company methodology likely had a significant impact on the results. These variations in the data underscore the soundness of the SEC’s view, expressed at the time it adopted the pay-ratio rule, that the rule was “designed to allow shareholders to better understand and assess a particular [company’s] compensation practices and pay ratio disclosures rather than to facilitate a comparison of this information from one [company] to another”; “the primary benefit” of the pay-ratio disclosure, according to the SEC, was to provide shareholders with a “company-specific metric” that can be used to evaluate CEO compensation within the context of that company. 

Is relative TSR still the performance metric of choice?

by Cydney Posner According to a just-released report from Equilar, an executive compensation and corporate governance data firm, “relative total shareholder return” continues to be the most common performance measure used in long-term incentive plans for CEOs among S&P 500 companies.  However, after years of increasing prevalence among companies in […]