This study investigates the impact of CEO busyness (i.e., holding multiple directorships) on CEO compensation for a U.S. sample of publicly traded Travel and Leisure firms. The research employs a sample of 58 companies listed on the S&P 1500 covering the period spanning between 2006 and 2019. Analyses are conducted on an unbalanced panel of 343 firm-year observations using the traditional pooled Ordinary Least-Square (OLS) model with robust standard errors. The findings indicate that multiple CEO directorships (or busyness) are critical to CEO compensation. Specifically, there is a significant and negative association between busy CEOs and their compensation. In other words, the result implies that busy CEOs, i.e., those holding multiple directorships in several firms, are likely to be offered a lower compensation package than their non-busy counterparts. Furthermore, additional analyses show that such a negative CEO busyness-compensation relationship is weaker for larger firms. The results are robust across different estimation models and alternative proxies for CEO busyness.
