ceo compensation
Hotel CEO Pay For Performance Study 2020
Keith Kefgen | September 28, 2020
By Keith Kefgen, Terry Donovan What a difference 6 months makes. 2020 began with hotel companies coming off one of the strongest years in history and feeling optimistic the good times would continue. Since then, the industry has had widespread closures, massive layoffs, and CEO’s taking significant pay cuts while grappling with a global pandemic. While we will explore the ramifications of this crisis in this article’s conclusion, much of this study is focused on 2019 compensation data. What we have found over the twenty-plus years of studying CEO pay, that boards are still challenged with linking CEO pay to company performance. In f...
CEO Compensation in the Shrinking Casino Industry
Keith Kefgen | November 6, 2019
(November 6, 2019) - As the list of public gaming CEOs continues to shrink due to consolidation and the growing competition of technology-based options, "gaming" in its broadest sense will force any entertainment organization to consider a multi-segment strategy (think the NFL, FanDuel, DraftKings, and Jay-Z). The casino industry will be no different, as younger adults focus on their mobile device and skills-based gambling. Thus, the annual AETHOS list of public gaming CEOs has dropped to its lowest level since 2002, when AETHOS started to track their pay. Today, only 12 CEOs run traditional casino operations. Now in its 13th year of stud...
Compensation for US CEOs in Lodging: Fair Pay Is a Real Issue
Keith Kefgen | February 18, 2019
(February 18, 2019) - AETHOS New York Managing Director Keith Kefgen, in his annual review of CEO compensation for a variety of hospitality disciplines, shares candid insights as a result of his latest look at CEOs of U.S. lodging companies: "What we have found over the twenty years of studying CEO pay, is that the many public boards did a poor job at linking CEO pay to company performance," observes Kefgen. "In fact, that was the goal of creating our pay-for-performance model." The AETHOS Pay-for-Performance Model analyzes key financial metrics such as market capitalization, stock appreciation, EBITDA growth, and to...
CEO Pay: Analysts’ Forecasts and Compensation
December 11, 2017
By Giuliano Bianchi CEO pay is a controversial topic as some executives have benefited massively from stock options even when their firms have not been performing well. Over the past three decades or so, firms have increasingly looked to stock options as an incentive for executives to make decisions which will enhance the performance of businesses. While there has been a great deal of adverse publicity and shareholders have expressed concerns about excessive pay, shareholders also want to make sure that the interests of management are aligned with their own. In a recent article in Applied Economics, I analyze the effect of share price t...
CEO Pay in Gaming: Founders vs Corporate Executives
Keith Kefgen, New York | November 6, 2017
By Keith Kefgen Besides technology, the gaming industry has one of the largest percentages of entrepreneurs running their respective companies. Larger than life personalities such as Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson actually cast a shadow well beyond gaming. But that is changing as entrepreneurs are slowly being replace by corporate execs such as Keith Smith at Boyd, Jim Murren at MGM, Tim Wilmott at Penn and Mark Frissora at Caesars. It is interesting to see how CEO compensation has changed as this process has unfolded. Generally speaking, the entrepreneurs took more of the compensation in equity, while corporate executive appear to have...
