On 27 November 2014, Dr Marc Moore (3CL Director and Reader in Corporate Law) delivered a prestigious Current Legal Problems lecture at University College London on the topic of 'Pay (In)Equity and Agent (Dis)Incentives'. The lecture was chaired by Professor Charlotte Villiers from the University of Bristol.
Moore's lecture recorded how recent decades have seen an explosion in levels of senior executive remuneration in public companies, both absolutely and relative to ordinary worker pay. A conspicuous corresponding trend over recent years, though, has been the development of a range of countervailing regulatory tools designed to mitigate this disparity within various national environments. These include regulatory pay ratio caps, bonus bans, and mandatory pay ratio disclosures. Notwithstanding these salient developments, prevailing legal and economic debates on executive and worker pay remain rooted in the dominant principal-agent paradigm of corporate governance, which consistently disputes the relevance of equitable or distributive fairness concerns to the essentially functional challenge of determining effective agent incentives. In his lecture, Moore took issue with the orthodox principal-agent perspective on pay equity, by demonstrating the centrality of equitable concerns to effective agent-incentive design, both at senior executive and ordinary worker levels.