Executive Compensation, Sustainable Compensation Policy, Carbon Performance and Market Value

Abstract We examine the interrelationships among executive compensation, environmental‐social‐governance‐based (ESG) sustainable compensation policy, carbon performance and market value. Using one of the largest datasets to date, consisting of 4379 firm‐year observations, covering a period of 15 years (2002–2016) from 13 industrialized European countries and insights from neo‐institutional theory (NIT), our findings are fourfold. First, our results suggest that process‐oriented carbon performance is positively associated with market value, whereas actual carbon performance has no effect on market value. Second, we show that the market value–process‐oriented carbon performance nexus is moderated by executive compensation. Third, our results indicate that executive compensation has a positive effect on process‐oriented carbon performance, but has no similar effect on actual carbon performance. Fourth, we show that the process‐oriented carbon performance–executive compensation nexus is reinforced for companies that adopt ESG‐based sustainable compensation policy. Our results are generally robust to controlling for governance mechanisms, alternative measures/estimations and endogeneities. Overall, our evidence supports the legitimization aspect of NIT and suggests that the market tends to reward firms with superior process‐oriented carbon performance instead of undervaluing firms with excessive actual carbon emissions. This implies that firms appear to use incentive‐based mechanisms to symbolically improve their process‐oriented carbon performance without substantively improving their actual carbon performance.