Corporate performance and CEO pay are poorly correlated, according to executive compensation expert Graef Crystal.

Crystal recently completed a study for Bloomberg News on the relationship between shareholder returns and CEO pay, and found that no matter how the data was sliced, the relationship was a poor one.  In other words, the relationship between what shareholders earn on their investments in a company and and what CEO earns is not a very good one.

By viewing the interactive graph at this link,  one can see that the link between pay and stock performance is a tenuous one. The data is based on over 2009 data from 271 large public companies that have already reported their financial results and their executive compensation.  2009 was a very good year for the most stocks, but a generally poor one for most businesses, so we should expect some divergences.

In periodic posts in the coming months we will look closer at this topic, as it's a "hot" one that won't seem to go away.

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Don't miss our upcoming intensive  1/2 day workshop "Utilizing Market Data and Conducting a Competitive Pay Analysis" on June 10th.  See here for more information.