Posts and Paychecks: A quantitative study of CEO visibility on professional social media platforms and subsequent compensation in Sweden and the U.S.

Sammanfattning

CEO compensation is a contested topic in business research, shaped by several determinants. One such factor is CEO visibility, which prior research has linked to CEO compensation in traditional media settings. However, it remains unclear whether this visibility-compensation relationship extends to professional social media platforms (PSMPs). This study examines whether CEO PSMP visibility is associated with subsequent CEO compensation, and whether this association differs between Sweden and the U.S. The study relies on signaling theory as the main theoretical framing, while national culture is used to motivate the country-level expectation. It applies a quantitative, comparative, and lagged firm-year design, where CEO PSMP visibility is measured before CEO compensation in the following year. CEO PSMP visibility is operationalized through a composite of LinkedIn engagement metrics, consisting of likes, comments, and reposts. The empirical sample consists of 818 firm-year observations from 336 publicly listed BICS Industrials firms in Sweden and the U.S. The hypotheses are tested using pooled OLS regressions with firm-clustered standard errors, firm-level controls, year fixed effects, and robustness specifications. The results show that CEO PSMP visibility is positively associated with CEO compensation, supporting the first hypothesis. The association remains consistent across the empirical analyses, but is economically modest. The second hypothesis is not supported, as the visibility-compensation association is not stronger in the U.S. than in Sweden. The study contributes by extending the CEO visibility-compensation literature from traditional media to a PSMP setting, examining the association in Sweden alongside the U.S., which is the more extensively studied context in related research, and comparing whether the relationship differs across the two national settings. Overall, the findings suggest that CEO PSMP visibility should be understood as a modest, complementary CEO-level factor, rather than as a central or causal explanation of CEO compensation.