Historically, CEO compensation (including incentive payments and stock options) tends to boom with the stock market. While pay has continued to grow in recent years, it hasn’t kept up with the S&P 500, according to data complied by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington. “The stock market has revived to its prior high from before the recession, but CEO pay hasn’t,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of EPI. “It has become a little less linked, but they’ve recovered plenty relative to everybody else.”
CNBC
August 10, 2015
“Frankly, I think every candidate that calls themselves conservative should be calling for an increase in the minimum wage,” said Dave Cooper, an analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “The polls show that a majority of Republican voters favor increasing the federal minimum wage.”
Politico
August 7, 2015
The companies’ pay ratios haven’t been calculated yet, but everyone acknowledges that many will be astronomical. A 2014 study by Alyssa Davis and Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning advocacy group in Washington, showed that chief executive pay as a multiple of the typical worker’s earnings zoomed from an average of 20 times in 1965 to almost 300 in 2013.
The New York Times
August 7, 2015
As Harwell reported, companies will have to disclose how the chief executive’s pay compares with the median pay of workers. “At America’s biggest companies, the top boss makes more than $300 for every $1 its typical worker earns, up from a $20-to-$1 split in 1965, Economic Policy Institute data show,” he wrote.
The Washington Post
August 7, 2015
According to Labor Department earnings statistics calculated by the Associated Press, a chief executive made about 205 times the average worker’s wage last year, compared with 257 times in 2013. “We need many more policies that change corporate governance, that change our tax policies towards corporate pay, that raise marginal income tax rates. But I think this is one piece of the puzzle,” says Lawrence Mishel, President of the Economic Policy Institute. “Companies already provide information in their proxy statement about what the CEO makes. But it adds a dimension. CEOs make a lot of money, and people don’t know how to put numbers in context, so one large number is no different than another very large number. So it could be that the ratio puts the number in context.”
The Christian Science Monitor
August 7, 2015
After all, average CEO compensation for the largest firms was $16.3 million in 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of CEO stock options, salary, bonuses, restricted stock grants, and long-term incentive payouts, resulting in an overall CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 303-to-1 in 2014.
Fortune
August 7, 2015
In fact, yes. And it’s not to shame CEOs. It’s to be well-armed with information when political debates emerge over the impact of raising the minimum wage or raising taxes on the wealthy. As the Economic Policy Institute has found, the trend toward increasing CEO compensation and stagnating wages for lower-rung workers has been increasing. Even during the recession, CEOs did just fine, while laying off workers due to decreased revenues. Key findings from an EPI report are…
U.S. News and World Report
August 7, 2015
As men and women ascend the professional ladder, pay disparities widen between the genders, said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy.
The Washington Post
August 7, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, for instance, believes that CEOs at the 350 largest U.S. firms earned about 303 times that of their average (not median) employee in 2014, including bonuses and stock options. That’s smaller than the 376-to-1 ratio recorded at the height of the dot-com bubble, but much larger than the gap recorded in 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crisis (196 to 1). The bottom line is that the current ratio is a very big number. And while CEO pay has climbed 54 percent since the recovery began in 2009, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the earnings of the typical employee haven’t budged a bit.
The Fiscal Times
August 7, 2015
Paid sick leave is a benefit that shows the divide in American labor markets. Among the highest 10 percent of earners, 86 percent of earners have it, while among the lowest 10 percent, just 22 percent have it, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. Thirty-nine percent of service workers have paid sick leave, according to Labor Department data.
The New York Times
August 6, 2015