Using a sample of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies for the period 2007-2013, this paper empirically tests the impact of family control and institutional investors on executive compensation. We find that family control curbs the level of executive compensation and the excess level of executive compensation. However, we do not observe a significant effect of family control on pay-performance sensitivity; We show that institutional ownership is associated with higher level of executive compensation and pay-performance sensitivity; institutional ownership can remarkably improve executive compensation of the family listed companies, but compared the family listed companies with professional managers; institutional ownership does not obviously improve executive compensation of the listed companies with family executives.