CEO Compensation and the Relationship with Company Growth : An Analysis of Swedish Listed OMX Stockholm Companies

Sammanfattning

As time progresses and compensation increases for CEOs, the need for information will be required to debate whether it is rational for CEOs to receive more pay in various forms. According to agency theory, CEOs have an intrinsic need to act in their self-interests, while the shareholder requires value creation and implements various safeguards to ensure that the CEOs do what they are expected to do. Therefore, corporate governance, which is a part of corporations' mechanisms, could be an act to minimise agency costs while forming the CEOs' compensation and controlling the work with various measures. Financial performance methods themselves, such as comparing revenue between years to control CEOs' work, are indeed essential to see if these could influence the CEOs' agenda. There have been previous studies regarding CEO compensation and company growth. However, there is a lack of research made in Sweden, especially for listed companies on OMX Stockholm. This research found a relationship between CEO compensation and firm growth. Nonetheless, previous research has shown contradicting results. This thesis performed a panel data regression that includes 354 unique firms that formed the OMX Stockholm PI, an index on Nasdaq. The firms have been observed for seven years, creating a data set with approximately 2,500 observations.