Keep the Bonuses, Change the Criteria

Thomas Gehrig and Lukas Menkhoff at VOX survey the research on bonuses and suggest we keep them, with some changes. An excerpt:

In fact, banks themselves are trying to correct their internal incentive schemes in order to re-adjust incentives on longer horizons. They seem to largely agree that, prior to the crisis, their systems may have been excessively short-sighted, and they are now trying to base rewards on more sustainable performance criteria such as average growth rates and volumes across longer sampling periods.

My suggestion (posted here) is measuring shareholder equity over a five year period.