Staff Working Paper No. 1,008
By Ieva Sakalauskaite and Qun Harris
In this paper, we study whether and how some of the remuneration rules introduced after the Global Financial Crisis affected bankers’ compensation using a unique regulatory dataset on remuneration in six major UK banks during 2014–19. We find that for bankers most affected by limits on their bonus to fixed pay ratios (the bonus cap), total pay growth did not decrease, but compensation shifted from bonuses to fixed remuneration. We also find some evidence which could indicate that requiring bankers’ bonuses to be deferred for longer periods was correlated with increases in total compensation and a lower proportion of bonuses being deferred.
Measuring the effects of bank remuneration rules: evidence from the UK