Executive Compensation in Shipping

The finance and economics literature has documented a rapid rise in executive compensation in the past 30 years. Concomitantly, there has been a lot of public outcry and media reports on excessive compensation coupled with a lack of pay for performance. Despite being an important component of corporate governance, executive compensation in shipping has not been systematically examined. We first review the general literature on executive (including CEO) compensation, followed by an empirical examination of executive compensation practice in the shipping industry across multiple countries. We end with a discussion of future research opportunities and challenges.