Equity Incentive, Agency Cost and Corporate Governance Efficiency

Based on the 681 listed companies that implemented the equity incentive plan from 2007 to 2017, this paper examines the influence mechanism and heterogeneity of equity incentives on agency cost and corporate governance efficiency from the perspective of human capital and "shareholder-executive-employee" principal-agent chain. We find that the employee equity incentive significantly reduces the agency cost and improves the corporate governance efficiency, but the incentive effect of executive equity incentive is stronger, and the performance of state-owned listed companies is more significant. ...