Executives’ overseas experience and corporate pay gap

ABSTRACT

The increasing number of migrants returning from developed countries has become a global trend. This study examined the impact of executives’ overseas experience on the corporate pay gap from the perspective of cultural differences. Using publicly available data collected manually from listed Chinese firms concerning executives’ overseas experience from 2011 to 2018, we found that executives’ overseas experience was positively associated with both internal and external pay gaps. Additionally, the higher the number of executives with overseas experience, the higher the pay gap. These findings highlight the effects of cultural differences on corporate governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Overseas experience
• internal pay gap
• external pay gap
• cultural differences

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C12
• M12

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as the data in this study were collected manually.

Additional information

Funding

This paper belongs to our project funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China, entitled ‘Exploring industry cluster upgrading on the scope of the global value chain: based on the background of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei’, the funding number of which is 15AGL024.