Abstract

The financial crisis has brought compensation systems to regulators' and banks boards' attention: these systems, especially at executive level, seem to have been partially responsible for an excessive risk taking behaviour. The article reviews the main contribution made on compensation, performance measurement and risk topics by the academic literature and suggests some interesting directions for the future research: the building of a comprehensive theory of compensation systems; the need of a deeper knowledge of existing practices and an assessment of their consistency with theories; empirical findings of cause and effect relationships between contingent variables, compensation systems features and performance; the choice of better performance indicators, more compliant of different stakeholders' perspectives and needs.