During the current financial crisis there is a large amount of scrutiny surrounding executive compensation packages. The purpose of this thesis is finding an understanding of executive compensation based around the makeup of the board of directors. We examine firms from the S&P 100 investigating the relationship between CEO compensation and the makeup of the board of directors. For this end, we examine different pieces of CEO compensation packages: salary, options awards and stock awards, in relation to salary and as standalone pieces. We use OLS regressions to see if the make-up of the board demonstrates a significant relationship with CEO compensation. The purpose of this examination is to determine what effect, if any, the makeup of the board of directors has on deciding executive compensation.
