Do large firms overly use stock-based incentive compensation?

This study employs the panel threshold model to reexamine the non-monotonic relationship between CEO stock-based compensation and firm earnings across various firm-size conditions. The feasibility of the model is tested using data for US non-financial firms from 1993 to 2005. Our empirical results indicate that while a positive relationship between the CEO stock-based pay and earnings is presented for small-size firms, a negative impact of CEO stock-based compensation on earnings is shown when large-size firms are concerned. Further, the longstanding puzzle of whether the CEO stock-based pay could enhance earnings among earlier studies could be satisfactorily explained by our empirical results.