Pay (in)equity and agent (dis)incentives

Speakers: Dr Marc T. Moore (University of Cambridge)
Chair: Professor Charlotte Villiers (University of Bristol)
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA (BSB pending)

Current Legal Problems 2014-15

It is trite that 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 this lecture, Marc Moore will take 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.

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About the speaker

Marc Moore joined UCL Laws in 2009, having previously taught at the University of Bristol (2004-2009). He studied law at the University of Glasgow (1997-2001), and completed a doctorate on corporate governance at the University of Bristol in 2006. Marc is Deputy Chief Examiner for Company Law on the University of London’s external LLB programme, and a visiting lecturer in corporate law at the University of Cambridge.

In 2011, he was a visiting lecturer in the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law & Society based at the Seattle University School of Law, where he taught courses in US business entities law and comparative corporate law. In 2010, Marc was UK national reporter on corporate governance for the 18th Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law at Washington, DC. In 2012, he was one of only five legal academics from across the UK to be awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize, for outstanding scholars who have made a substantial and acknowledged contribution to their field of study.

In 2013 Marc’s book, Corporate Governance in the Shadow of the State (2013, Hart Publishing), was shortlisted for the SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. From 2009 to 2010, Marc acted as director of the UCL Centre for Ethics & Law during the formative stages of its development. He has also been Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Commercial Law, and specialism convenor for graduate corporate law teaching at UCL (2011-2013).

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems annual lecture series was established over sixty years ago. The lectures are public, delivered on a weekly basis and chaired by members of the judiciary.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) annual volume is published on behalf of UCL Laws by Oxford University Press, and features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues. It covers all areas of legal scholarship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.

Find out more about CLP on the Oxford University Press website