CEO Compensation in Japan: Why so Different from the United States? Why so Different from the United States?

In Mar. 2010, Japan's financial regulator implemented the country's first legislation concerning the disclosure of director compensation for named individuals. Using the first publicly available data for Japanese executives, we document direct evidence on the level, structure, and mechanisms of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation in Japan and perform a matched-sample comparison between Japan and the United States. In contrast to the findings of recent studies showing that international differentials in CEO pay have largely disappeared since the mid-2000s, our results show strikingly large differences between the Japanese and American systems that are difficult to explain by differences in conventional incentive contracts.