1 Abstract The equity-based incentives are considered to be one of the instruments helping to motivate executives. The use of this compensation framework should in theory tackle and mitigate the agency problems, and prevent the possible attempts of managers to pursue their own interest over the interests of shareholders. The literature focusing on the effects differs greatly. There is no conformity over the effect of equity compensation on company performance. This research study the effect of CEO-related equity incentives and stock ownership on company performance. The main finding is the positive effect of the equity incentives measured by the percentage of CEOs' equity- based compensation on company performance proxied by the change in Tobin's Q. The thesis does not find any significant effect of insiders' stock ownership. The dataset of 107 publicly traded US companies is used for the empirical analysis. The results are estimated based on a fixed effects model and pooled ordinary least squares. This thesis contributes to the ongoing debate over the effects. It also widens the narrow literature on the structure of compensation. JEL Classification M120 Keywords Equity-based, CEO, compensation structure, equity ownership, company performance Author's e-mail theo.sarec@gmail.com Supervisor's e-mail...