First step: Identify companies to study and compare with their peers.
Search business news sources: LexisNexis, Westlaw ALLNEWS, ABI-INFORM, Ebsco Business Search Premier.
Suggested searches: stories that have Corporate Governance and Executives or Executive Compensation as subject terms, or stories executive compensation that mention activist institutional shareholders such as CalPERS, TIAA-CREF, union pension funds, and Vanguard mutual funds. You can locate other shareholder activist groups through the Corporate Governance web site.
Top Executive Compensation, an annual survey from the Conference Board
AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch. Search by industry, company ticker symbol, or total value of compensation.
Council of Institutional Investors shareholder initiatives and Focus List of underperforming corporations.
Second step: Search LexisNexis for details of executive compensation
Executive Compensation is described in three types of SEC filings:
Search these three files: SEC Form 10-K, Employment Contracts from SEC Filings, and Executive Compensation from Proxy Statements
Suggested searches: Search the filings of a company you are interested in. Expand your research by searching for executive compensation at other companies in the same industry by searching on the first company's SIC code.
Search the file Executive Compensation from Proxy Statements for the name of a shareholder activist group, the name of a specific shareholder initiative, or a specific type of compensation, such as bonuses, incentive pay, or stock options. When you have identified companies facing proxy contents, look up other filings from theses companies to get complete information on executive compensation.
The U.S. Executive Compensation Database: Boards and Committees reports salaries and total other compensation for officers of a company. (This database is searched with U.S. Company Profiles.) The U.S. Executive Compensation Database: Executive Biographies lists compensation for individual executives.
Thomson Financial is worth checking, once you have identified your target companies, if you want to download information from the Edgar filings in Excel format. Thomson Research offers financial from the latest 10-K form (not including executive compensation) and from the last ten years, and of executive compensation from the proxy statements.
Step 3: Compare your target companies with their peers
On LexisNexis, you can expand your search by looking up SEC filings for other companies with the same SIC code, and by getting financial reports on your target companies in the Disclosure file.
On Mergent Online, you can make a Company Analysis List of companies that have a particular SIC code, or a list of individual companies that you have identified from another source, such as Fortune or Standard & Poor's rankings. Mergent can then generate a comparison report that compares the financial performance of the companies in your list using a variety of criteria: net revenues, ROI, EBITDA, debt, cash flow, etc.
Factiva's Company and Markets section lets you create a company list and simple comparison reports.