Your boss has a lot more zeroes at the end of his paycheck than you do. In 2015, chief executives in America’s largest companies made an average of $15.5 million in compensation per year, which is 276 times the annual average pay of the typical worker, according to data released Tuesday by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Economic Policy Institute. And that already-large number was even higher in 2014, when the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 302-to-1.
MarketWatch
July 14, 2016
Average CEO pay for the top 350 biggest firms was $15.5 million in 2015, according to a new report released by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. That represents a 276 to 1 pay ratio to the typical worker. What’s shocking is that’s down from last year. In 2014, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 302 and the average pay was $16.3 million. Average CEO pay for the top 350 biggest firms was $15.5 million in 2015. That represents a 276 to 1 pay ratio to the typical worker. Economist Lawrence Mishel, who led the study, was initially surprised. “CEO compensation is something that usually doesn’t go down unless there’s a big tech bubble burst [like] in 2000 [or a] financial crisis,” he said.
PBS News Hour
July 14, 2016
CEOs on average made $15.5 million last year, which is 276 times more than a typical worker did, according to a study released Tuesday
These figures actually show a smaller gap than the previous year. In 2014, that ratio was 302-to-1, with CEOs earning $16.3 million.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean companies have fundamentally changed how they pay their CEOs, according to the Economic Policy Institute study, a nonprofit think tank that researches economic trends. The lower ratio had to do with a volatile market instead of a fundamental change within companies, so “CEO pay can be expected to resume its sharp upward trajectory when the stock market resumes rising,” the report reads.
NPR Marketplace
July 13, 2016
Black pay, white pay: These racial disparities show up in pay, of course, as the work of economist Valerie Wilson has shown (Wilson’s work is a national treasure trove of information on racial economic disparities). In this paper, Wilson shows that in periods where labor markets really tightened up, this pumped-up reaction function I just noted is highly operative: “in all periods when median household income for African Americans increased more than that for whites (1982-1990, 1991-2001, and 1995-2000), African American households also experienced a greater increase in hours worked than did white households, especially if the households had lower incomes.” To be clear, neither racial wage nor income gaps closed, but the longer we stay at full employment, the more pressure there is on those gaps.
The Washington Post
July 13, 2016
To think through smart protectionism, consider the controversial history of NAFTA. Sanders and Trump have blasted the trade agreement for, as Jeff Faux, the founding president of the Economic Policy Institute, put it, opening “the door through which American workers were shoved, unprepared, into a brutal global competition for jobs that has cut their living standards and is destroying their future.”
The Atlantic
July 13, 2016
The top 350 US CEOs earned 5.1% less last year than in 2014, bringing home an average of just $15.5m, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. The dip in earnings had little to do with the increased attention to income inequality or discrepancy in pay between top executives and low-wage workers. Instead it’s all down to last year’s turbulent stock market.The report, released on Tuesday by the left-leaning firm, comes at a time when both the S&P 500 and Dow have reached new record highs.
The Guardian
July 13, 2016
In 2015, the average chief executive at the largest corporations in the U.S. earned 276 times what a typical worker made ― about $15 million, a new paper from the Economic Policy Institute reports. The number actually fell a bit from 2014 ― when CEOs on average made around $16 million ― because of declines in the stock market. Still the ratio of CEO pay to normal person pay remains so high it’s almost kind of funny ― except for how that money could be put to more productive uses.
The Huffington Post
July 13, 2016
As Bernstein and Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute also observed, black unemployment is more volatile than that of whites — it rises faster in slack times and falls faster as the economy moves toward full employment: “Between 1979 and 2014, the average annual black unemployment rate changed by 1.7 percentage points for every 1-percentage-point change in the national unemployment rate,” Wilson wrote. Real wage growth for black households will also grow faster than in white households, albeit marginally.
Los Angeles Times
July 12, 2016
CEO pay was slightly down from the year before in both raw-dollar terms and in comparison to worker earnings, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s updated figures. Stock markets struggled in 2015, causing the figures to dip from a $16.3 million average compensation and a CEO-to-worker pay ratio north of 300-to-1. But CEO pay is still up 46.5 percent from its 2009 levels despite the decline in executive earnings that mostly come in the form of stock options, EPI notes
Think Progress
July 12, 2016