Role of CEO age in determining executive-employee pay gap in Chinese listed manufacturing companies: A perspective of risk aversion

Abstract

The paper investigates the effect of CEO age on executive-employee pay gap (EEPG), a newly focused dimension of executive compensation arrangements by the literature, by choosing the panel data consisting of 3495 firm-years in Chinese listed manufacturing companies during 2010-2014 as the research sample. Empirical analysis based on multiple regression analysis adopting the method of OLS by applying SPSS19.0 makes a new finding, i.e., there is a positive relationship between CEO age and EEPG, which holds robust with the change of the measures. Further investigation on the determination mechanism of CEO age on EEPG show that older CEOs intend to set relatively lower EEPG out of their risk aversion needs.