抄録
This paper tries to capture the change in corporate governance and in the mindset of top executives in Japanese companies by analyzing executive compensation systems from recent years. The results reconfirm the positive relationship between executive cash compensation and accounting performance, consistent with previous research. The results also show that companies with higher foreign share ownership tend to have executive cash compensation that is less sensitive to accounting profit and tend to have stock option plans. These conclusions collectively imply that shareholder return gets a higher priority while accounting profit gets a lower priority for companies with more vocal shareholders. Japanese corporate governance used to be characterized as a mainbank oriented system in which main-banks played the role of shareholders. The results of this paper imply that as share ownership structure has changed in Japan, shareholders have emerged as "principals" as discussed in agency theory.
