The authors test the deregulation hypothesis that posits that bank CEO compensation became more sensitive to performance as bank management became less regulated. They observe a significant increase in pay-performance sensitivities from their 1976-81 regulation subsample to their 1982-88 deregulation subsample. These increases in pay sensitivities after deregulation are observed for salary and bonus, stock options, and common stock holdings. The authors observe increases in the pay-performance relation associated with high-capitalization-ratio banks, consistent with providing incentives for wealth creation while even larger increases in pay-performance sensitivity for lower capitalization-ratio banks suggest an Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation moral hazard problem.
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Crawford et al. (1995) studied this question.