CEO pay is weakly explained by firm performance

Quality and quantity of direct evidence for or against the claim — RCTs, systematic reviews, natural experiments, large cohort studies.

Tosi et al.'s meta-analysis finding firm performance explains under 5% of CEO pay variance while size explains over 40% provides strong, well-sourced support.

Whether the proposed mechanism is valid and established — does the how make sense, or are there fundamental flaws in the causal logic?

Bertrand & Mullainathan's pay-for-luck mechanism and Gabaix & Landier's size-based model both validate that pay tracks firm scale and observable luck more than controllable performance.

Degree of agreement among domain experts and relevant scientific or policy bodies — depth and quality of consensus, not just majority opinion.

Corporate governance researchers broadly accept the weak performance-pay link, following Bebchuk & Fried's managerial-power critique of board-set compensation.

Whether findings hold across independent studies, populations, and contexts — resistance to p-hacking and publication bias.

The weak-performance-link finding replicates across multiple decades of CEO pay studies synthesized in Tosi et al.'s meta-analysis.