Library | ESG issues
Remuneration & Pay Links
Executive and board remuneration refers to compensation structures designed to attract, retain, and incentivise senior management and board members to act in the best interests of the company and its stakeholders. Companies can link remuneration to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) key performance indicators (KPIs) to align leadership incentives with long-term sustainability goals. This approach can enhance corporate accountability, encourages responsible decision-making.
Refine
81 results
REFINE
SHOW: 16
Gender equality in capital markets: Insights, evidence and opportunities for action
This research examines gender equality in international capital markets, identifying barriers in culture, visibility, and sponsorship. Drawing on qualitative survey data and industry statistics, it highlights progress and stalls in representation and pay while offering practical actions for organisational change and leadership accountability.
The relationship between carbon emissions and wages: Evidence from Japanese manufacturing installations
This research examines the relationship between CO₂ emissions and wages in Japanese manufacturing installations from 2006 to 2019. It identifies a positive association when productivity is constant, driven by rent sharing and working conditions. The study highlights significant distributional implications for the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Good practice for credible verification of living wages
This guidance establishes a tool-agnostic framework for the credible verification of living wage gaps. It details good practices for assessing remuneration data, in-kind benefits via the ARI 2025 approach, and living wage estimates. Key requirements include methodological rigour, triangulation, and independent oversight to ensure accurate, comparable outcomes.
Bank executive compensation and risk-taking
This research investigates bank executive compensation since the Great Financial Crisis. It finds that longer deferral horizons successfully reduce risk-taking and encourage prudent capital management. However, evidence regarding variable pay caps is inconclusive. Case studies from 2023 failures highlight governance shortcomings in risk-adjusting performance metrics and compensation schemes.
Buybacks playbook
This playbook provides a framework for companies, investors, and policymakers to evaluate share buybacks based on long-term merits. It recommends objective capital allocation, decoupling executive pay from buyback-influenced metrics, and enhancing regulatory disclosures and trading restrictions to ensure repurchases support sustainable corporate strategy rather than short-term gains.
European employment and social outlook series
This report is part of a series providing an analysis of labour market and social developments within the European Union. It examines the relationship between job quality, productivity and economic performance, evaluating dimensions such as earnings and job security to inform evidence-based policymaking across Member States.
The value of non-value-maximizing managers
This research argues that hiring managers biased towards poorly-measured goals, such as social impact, is often optimal. This selection allows organisations to implement high-powered financial incentives for well-measured tasks without neglecting non-financial objectives. The study highlights how managerial selection and incentive design function as complementary governance tools.
Power to the personnel? The impacts of managerial discretion vs. worker democracy in employee recognition
This research evaluates the impacts of worker agency versus managerial discretion in employee recognition via an RCT in India. While worker democracy increased attendance by 11%, managerial discretion improved productivity by 6%. However, managerial control reduced work-related interactions, and worker voting encouraged collusion through reward sharing in exchange for votes.
Firm pay, amenities, and inequality
This research assesses firm-specific amenity valuations using discrete choice experiments linked to German administrative records. It finds that amenities widen between-firm inequality by 20% in variance terms. Furthermore, gender differences in valuations contribute to female sorting into lower-wage firms, as women prioritise non-wage attributes more highly.
The commoditization of labor
This research examines how technological standardisation commoditises labour by making workers interchangeable. It develops a model showing that while this process increases productivity, it simultaneously reduces worker bargaining power and wages. This framework explains the declining large-firm wage premium and the divergence between productivity and pay in services.
Excessive executive compensation: Investor guidance
Published by ICCR in April 2026, this report provides investor guidance on addressing excessive executive compensation. It outlines proxy voting guidelines, pay thresholds, and stewardship frameworks to help investors challenge the growing gap between CEO and worker pay, and promote greater accountability and long-term value creation.
Incentivising climate action with executive remuneration in Australia
Provides a framework for linking climate goals to executive remuneration in Australia, emphasising alignment with credible transition strategies, measurable and sector-specific metrics, appropriate weighting, and transparent disclosure. Highlights growing adoption, implementation challenges, and guiding principles to improve investor engagement and incentive effectiveness.
Production and externalities: How corporate governance shapes social costs
This working paper examines how corporate governance structures influence firms’ production decisions and associated negative externalities. Using a principal–agent model and empirical analysis, the authors show that costly managerial monitoring encourages performance-based pay, which can incentivise practices that increase socially costly production and broader social costs.
Women’s equality in the workplace series
The Gender Equality Report & Ranking is an annual benchmark series, first launched in 2017, that assesses corporate gender equality across publicly listed companies using Equileap’s proprietary scorecard. It enables investors and finance professionals to compare company performance, monitor progress and incorporate gender equality considerations into investment analysis.
Tackling the transformation: The challenges of operationalizing corporate sustainability goals and how to overcome them
ERM’s Transformation Survey analyses global corporate progress in operationalising sustainability goals. It finds stronger performance on social issues than climate or nature, identifies weak sustainability-linked incentives as the main barrier, and highlights underinvestment in training, incentives, and ESG data systems.
A theory of fair CEO pay
This research models executive pay where CEOs suffer disutility from 'unfair' wages. Firms motivate effort by threatening zero pay for poor performance, offering a fair output share only above a threshold. This rationalises performance-vesting equity and pay-for-performance structures even without traditional moral hazard incentives.
