This paper finds some stylized facts about executive pay in South Korea. Using aggregate data of the listed companies since 2002, we find that 1) the director’s remuneration has risen faster than the employee compensation, thus, the pay ratio of executive and employee has escalated from 3.0 to 4.5; 2) the executive compensation for large business group fluctuates more widely than that for small and medium enterprises does, hence the pay ratio for large firms changes widely too; 3) the median pay ratio has not grown monotonically but it rather rises to remain still around year 2011, which is accounted for mostly by small and medium enterprises. New information on executive compensation by compulsory disclosure starting from 2013 made further analysis of CEO compensation attainable. Based on the conventional regression analysis for 2013-2017, we find that 1) the elasticity of CEO pay with respect to firm value is about 0.18; 2) the volatility of stock return is negatively related to CEO pay; 3) contemporaneous stock return is positively associated with the pay; 4) there is insufficient evidence that large business groups pay their CEOs more than small and medium enterprises do. These results are robust under various model specifications.

Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
3. Data
4. Results
    4.1. Level of Executive Pay
    4.2. The Structure of CEO Pay
    4.3. Cross-Sectional Variation in CEO Pay
5. Conclusion and Discussion
References

• Jae Hyun GWON(School of Northeast Asian Studies, Incheon National University.)
• Byoung Soon MOON(LG Economic Research Institute.) Corresponding Author.