Hur påverkas VD : ns belöningssystem av ägandet? – en studie av svenska noterade bolag

Sammanfattning: There is a strong debate in the media about the CEO compensation in the listed companies and whether they deserve their high rewards. Many previous studies have shown differences in the reward system depending on the ownership structure, mostly testing for only ownership concentration or ownership category. This study aims to investigate how the influence of the owners affects the CEO reward system, testing for both the level and the structure of the reward. The sample used in the investigation is Swedish listed corporations and consists of 251 observations. A survey was also conducted but due to low response rate and because the answers are not representative for the whole sample the survey will only be used as an illustration. The findings support the assumption that the higher the ownership concentration a lesser amount of stock options is used but the rest of the statistics on the ownership concentration does not show any significance. The results also show that the different categories of owners affect the reward system in different ways, it is difficult however to draw any general conclusions in which direction the affect goes. The ownership concentration on the board and the CEO confirms some of the study’s hypothesis while others result in the direct opposite of what was expected. This indicates that the board and the CEO do not react in the way that much of the existing theory predicts. Overall, the results indicate that a different way of measuring the ownership concentration and the categories of owners is preferable and may be interestingly conducted in another study.