Corporate greed isn't good, but it might not be as bad for inequality as we thought - or at least not in the way we thought. Now it seems pretty obvious that inequality must have something to do with executive pay. After all, big-company CEOs only made 30 times as much as the average worker in 1978, but make 295 times as much today. The simple story is that corporate bigwigs have doled out cushy jobs on their boards to buddies who have rubber-stamped whatever pay packages they ask for, so that they're all but guaranteed to walk away with millions whether or not they're actually, you know, good at their jobs. Simple, but not quite right. That's because new research shows that, as Slate's Jordan Weissmann puts it, its not super-managers, but rather super-managers and everybody else at super-companies that are behind the growing income gap.
This article was published by The Washington Post on May 29, 2015
Link to article here
Related publications
'Firming up Inequality', Jae Song, David J. Price, Fatih Guvenen and Nicholas Bloom, Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper No.1354, May 2015
Related links
Nicholas Bloom webpage
Growth Programme webpage
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