386 / 414
審計委員會權益薪酬之決定因素
386
= -17.29) and
LIQ_CONSTRAINTS
shows a significantly positive (Coefficient = 6.936,
Z-statistics = 1.45) relationship with
EQUCOMP
. Cash and equity-based awards tend to be
complementary components of audit committee members’ compensation. Firms facing
liquidity constraint problems may substitute equity compensation for cash pay, in accord
with Core and Guay (2001).
LNSALES
and
R&D
show no significant relation to equity
compensation for audit committee members.
6. Conclusion
Motivated by the growing trend of offering equity-based compensation to audit
committee members, the enhanced role of the audit committee because of new regulations
and the focus on audit committee independence, we examine factors that affect firms’
decisions to offer equity-based compensation to audit committee members. Given that
equity-based compensation might provide incentives for executives to conduct earnings
management to increase stock prices, such compensation might result in these committee
members’ compromising their monitoring roles. However, companies continue to provide
equity-based compensation for their audit committee members. In this study, we investigate
the factors that might be associated with companies’ decisions to choose equity-based
compensation for audit committee members.
Using 5,259 observations of U.S. companies from 2006 to 2012, we find that agency
conflict in a firm is significant and negatively associated with the presence of equity-based
compensation for audit committee members, suggesting that when concerns about agency
conflict are large, firms provide less equity-based compensation to alleviate these concerns.
In addition, firms where more compensation committee members also sit on the audit
committee are significantly more likely to give equity-based compensation to audit
committees. Because the potential benefit of stock and options is higher relative to that of a
fixed salary, these overlapping committee members might prefer equity-based compensation
to enlarge their personal wealth. Finally, firms with more audit committee members who are
top managers in other firms are less likely to give equity pay to audit committee members.
The results suggest that because these top management members already receive a large
amount of equity-based compensation from their home company, because of risk exposure
concerns, they prefer a fixed salary from the board they sit on.
Our study is subject to several caveats. First, some of the variables involve several
assumptions; thus they may contain some measurement errors. Second, while we control for