高管薪资

　　The final reckoning

　　死后算账

　　When bosses die in office, their true value is revealed

　　经理意外翘辫子了，他们的真正价值才浮出水面

　　Worth every penny

　　一分钱一分货

　　IN HIS book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, Thomas Piketty argues that it is impossible to find an “objective basis” for the high salaries of senior executives in terms of their individual productivity: they pay themselves such exorbitant sums simply because they can. However, in a forthcoming paper in Management Science, an American journal, two academics claim to have found such an objective measure, and conclude that most bosses are not overpaid.

　　托马斯·皮克提在他的《二十一世纪的资本论》一书中有这样的论述，即就高级管理人员的的个人生产力而言，实在是找不到他们能获得高额薪水的“客观依据”：他们为自己开出这么高的薪水，纯粹就是因为他们有权力这么做。然而，在即将发表在《管理科学》的一篇论文中，两位学者宣称他们发现了一种客观的衡量标准，并由此得出大多数高管的薪水并没有多付。

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　　In their study, Bang Dang Nguyen of the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School and Kasper Meisner Nielsen of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology looked at how firms' shares react when the chief executive or another prominent manager dies suddenly. They identified 149 cases of this happening at American companies between 1991 and 2008.

　　该论文的作者分别是贾吉商学院的Bang Dang Nguyen和香港科技大学Kasper Meisner Nielsen，他们研究着眼于当企业的总经理或其他高管意外死亡后公司股价的变动情况。他们从1991至2008年间的美国公司中甄选出了149家发生此类情况的公司进行研究。

　　They deem a boss to be overpaid if he gets more than his peers at firms of a similar type and size, but fails to boost his company's stockmarket value by at least the amount of his pay premium. They then assume that when an overpaid boss dies, investors will expect his successor's pay to revert to the average, and will mark up its shares in anticipation of getting back the excess amount they had been handing to the deceased.

　　这两位研究者认为，判断一名总经理薪资过高的标准是：如果一名总经理的薪水高于与他所在公司同类型、同等大小公司的总经理的薪资水平，但他给公司市值带来的提升却低于其薪资的溢价。他们继续假设，若一名薪资虚高的经理去世，股东们会预计他的继任者薪资将回归正常水平，于是就可以收回原先由死者多占有的那部分财富，进而抬高了股价。

　　So, if the shares rise on an executive's death, that means he was overpaid; if they fall, he was not. By this measure only 42% of the bosses studied were overpaid; furthermore, those with the most eye-popping rewards were found to be giving the best value for money, as measured by the share-price slump when they passed away.

　　所以说，如果一名经理去世后，其公司的股价上升了，那就说明该经理的薪资过高了；股价降低的话，则没有。依据这种判断方法，作为研究样本的总经理中薪资过高的比重只有42%了。此外，那些报酬高的令人咋舌的经理人，他们给公司带来的价值完全对得起他们的薪资—他们去世后公司股价往往会大幅下跌。

　　The study also reckons that of the increase in value that results from a firm hiring an executive, he gets 71% and the shareholders therefore get 29%. In the sense that investors at least get some positive reward from the relationship, executives as a whole are not overpaid.

　　研究还计算出，一家公司雇佣的高管为其创造的价值提升中，该高管获得其中的71%，其他29%则是股东的收益。在这场雇佣关系中，股东是受益方，从这一层面讲，整体上来说高级管理人员的薪资并不过高。

　　Followers of Mr Piketty are unlikely to be convinced. They would say that even when bosses add more value than the amount by which their pay exceeds the average, they are still overpaid because the average is itself excessive; and that it is inherently indecent for bosses to get such a big share of the gains from their relationship with their firms. But at least the study has added a bit of light to a debate that usually generates little but heat.

　　也许，皮特提的追随者们不会就这么被说服。他们会说，即使高管们创造的价值要比他薪资高于平均水平

　　的数额还高，他的薪资仍是不合理的，因为这个平均水平本身就太高了；而且，一名从雇佣者那里捞走在收益中的这么大一部分，这件事本身就不很光彩。但不管怎样，这项研究还是这个雷声大雨点小的争议领域的一场新雨。