Media clips
-
The Economic Policy Institute report says this means CEO pay could be reduced without hurting economic growth or productivity. EPI says top U.S. CEOs make 300 times more than typical American workers, down from a peak of 376 times in 2000 but well above levels seen in the preceding four decades. “The growth of CEO and executive compensation overall was a major factor driving the doubling of the income shares of the top 1% and top 0.1% of U.S. households from 1979 to 2007,” write EPI researchers Lawrence Mishel and Alyssa Davis.
Wall Street Journal June 23, 2015 -
Chief executives of the country’s largest firms made 303 times more than a “typical” worker in 2014, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. That number seems high, but is lower than it was in 2000, when CEO compensation peaked at 376 times that of the average worker. The report found that average compensation in 2014 for CEOs of the largest firms was $16.3 million, up 3.9% from a year before and an increase of 54.3% since 2009 when the economy began to recover.
Los Angeles Times June 23, 2015 -
In between 1978 and 2014, inflation-adjusted CEO pay increased by almost 1,000%, according to a report released on Sunday by the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, typical workers in the U.S. saw a pay raise of just 11% during that same period. With these increases in mind, it should come as no surprise that the ratio between average American CEO pay and worker pay is now 303-to-1. This ratio is lower than its peak in 2000, when it was 376-to-1, but it’s in excess of the 1965 ratio of 20-to 1.
Fortune June 23, 2015 -
According to the report by the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs of the top 350 publicly owned U.S. companies earned, on average, $16.3 million a year — 303.4 times more than the average worker earned in 2014. The ratio of CEO-to-average worker pay is up 244.7 percent since 1965, when it was 20-to-1, the report states. It is down, however, from a 2000 peak of about 376-to-1. The Economic Policy Institute attributes the sharp increase in the ratio of CEO-to-average worker pay to skyrocketing CEO compensation even as average worker pay has stagnated. Since 1978, when pay packages began to rise more dramatically, CEO compensation has gone up 997 percent, even as the average worker pay has risen 10.9 percent in the same period.huff
The Huffington Post June 23, 2015 -
In 1975, the last year the threshold was significantly raised, 60 percent of salaried workers fell within the requirement for overtime pay. Today, only 8 percent do, according to statistics compiled by the Economic Policy Institute. Under the new rule, millions of workers will be reclassified. Businesspeople oppose the change, calling it a job killer. Supporters anticipate a positive effect on job creation, income inequality and wage stagnation.
The New York Times June 22, 2015 -
Lavish CEO pay is no secret. Reviewing the largest 350 firms, Lawrence Mishel and Alyssa Davis of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute find that chief executive pay averaged $16.3 million in 2014. The New York Times, citing estimates from the consulting firm Equilar, reports that the 200 best-paid CEOs averaged $22.6 million. To be fair, some qualifications. Even Mishel concedes that CEO pay is below previous peaks in 2000 and 2007, mainly because the stock market has lagged. (CEO compensation routinely includes large stock grants.) Still, CEOs have far outpaced most workers. In 1965, the ratio of CEO pay to the pay of typical workers was 20 to 1, Mishel estimates. Now it’s 300 to 1.
The Washington Post June 22, 2015 -
“The claim is that high CEO pay is a marker for talent,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the report, who disagrees with the notion that the extraordinarily high compensation of executives is proportional to the skill required to run a large, publicly traded company. “This data would suggest that executives are not only 300 times more talented than the average worker, but also six times more talented and valuable than other people in the top one-thousandth of earners.”
Wall Street Journal June 22, 2015 -
The US economy is rebounding for the nation’s top income earners, but not for everyone else, according to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute. The study, published Sunday, finds that chief executives at the country’s 350 biggest firms earned an average of $16.3 million in 2014, marking a 54.3 percent increase since 2009. Meanwhile, compensation for typical workers in the same industries as those CEOs fell 1.7 percent over the same time period. “Those at the top of the income distribution, including many CEOs, are seeing a strong recovery, while the typical worker is still experiencing the detrimental effects of a stagnant labor market,” the study authors, Lawrence Mishel and Alyssa Davis, found.
Mother Jones June 22, 2015 -
The current answer appears to be a ratio of more than 300-to-1, according to a new study from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The meteoric rise of CEO pay is nothing short of breathtaking, outpacing not only the wages of ordinary workers, but also gains in the stock market and the not-too-shabby rise of income among America’s 0.1 percent of top earners. Surging CEO pay has potentially negative implications for other employees, leaving less on the table for wages, benefits and other compensation. Top execs at large public companies are keeping about 10 percent of their companies’ net profits, about double the rate in the early 1990s, according to the AFL-CIO.
While some would argue that CEOs are earning more because they provide extraordinary benefits to their companies, EPI president Lawrence Mishel says the evidence doesn’t support that. “CEO compensation has done so much better than corporate profits or the stock market,” Mishel said. “I don’t think it’s because they are very highly skilled, although they are skilled. The other high-wage earners are very highly skilled as well. I think CEOs are paid more because they can get paid more.”
CBS Moneywatch June 22, 2015 -
CEO pay at the nation’s largest companies is 303 times that of the average pay of their employees, according to a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. The average total compensation of CEOs at the 350 largest firms, including stock options and other bonuses, came to $16.3 million in 2014, according to EPI. That compares to just over $50,000 in pay for their workers.
CNN Money June 22, 2015 -
While the Great Recession officially ended six years ago, the labor market has not yet fully recovered, and that’s left many college graduates struggling to find jobs that match their skills and education level. “The depth of the recession and the slow pace of recovery since it ended means that seven classes of students have now graduated into a weak labor market and have had to compete with more experienced workers for a limited and slowly growing pool of job opportunities,” wrote researchers at the Economic Policy Institute in a recent paper.
CNBC June 22, 2015 -
In its new report, Inequalities at the Starting Gate, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found that race-based gaps in skills such as reading, math, eagerness to learn, persistence, and focus shrink significantly when socioeconomic status is taken into account. About 46 percent of black children live in poverty, the study noted. Sixty-three percent of Hispanic ELLs live in poverty. Emma García, an economist at EPI and the author of the report, said that there is an economic imperative to addressing these academic and non-cognitive skills gaps. “Not doing anything is going to be more costly than doing something,” she said. “We are compromising so much human capital by not making sure children are ready to learn and can develop fully when they go to school.” The report’s title is a deliberate allusion to a 2002 report, also published by the Economic Policy Institute, called Inequality at the Starting Gate. That study drew on the experiences of children who started school in 1998.
Education Week June 19, 2015 -
One report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the companies are abusing the H1-B visa program to help U.S. companies cut labor costs. Brookings, however, found that H1-B workers make more than their American counterparts.
The Atlantic June 19, 2015 -
Average CEO pay at the 350 largest U.S. companies by revenue surged 937 percent from 1978 to 2013, while the compensation of non-supervisory employees rose 10.2 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a research group that advocates for workers. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has returned more than 5,000 percent over the same time period, with dividends reinvested.
Bloomberg June 19, 2015 -
Despite numerous glowing depictions of the American Dream in movies and books, upward mobility is much more uncommon in the United States than you might think. In fact, there’s considerably more mobility in almost all other developed economies, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute.
Orange County Register June 19, 2015 -
A number of progressives dispute the assertion that automation is the prime culprit. In a 2013 report, the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit organization in Washington, contends that between 2001 and 2011, 2.1 million U.S. manufacturing jobs disappeared because of the ballooning trade deficit with China.
Columbus Dispatch June 19, 2015 -
From my brief observation, these are really sweet kids. But many face special burdens: fractured families; parents who don’t speak English and are sometime illiterate in Spanish; parents with crazy work schedules. There’s a larger issue, as a recent report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute warned: “Lower-social-class parents engage in fewer educationally supportive activities with young children, such as reading aloud or playing cognitively stimulating games.”
The Washington Post June 18, 2015 -
In fact, so many cities and states have boosted their minimum legal wage above federal government’s $7.25 an hour that at least 60 percent of the country’s workforce now lives in a place in which the minimum wage sits well above that national requirement, according to David Cooper, an economic analyst with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post June 18, 2015 -
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that between five million and 10 million workers could become newly eligible for overtime pay, depending upon the threshold increase and other rule changes. EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey forecast that the new rule would also create “several hundreds of thousands of jobs” in the year after it is implemented due to employers hiring new workers rather than paying overtime to existing employees.
Wall Street Journal June 18, 2015 -
These economists, along with the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign, are part of a growing movement pushing for monetary policy that prioritizes full employment, and the wage growth that comes with it, rather than concerns about price inflation. “I think 2015 is too soon at the current economic pace” for a rate increase, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute. “There is strange eagerness to do it sooner rather than later, but the data just refuses to cooperate.”
Bivens noted that the same Fed projections that appear to show a consensus for raising rates in 2015 forecast slightly higher unemployment and slightly lower gross domestic product growth than previous estimates. Bivens said he wants the Fed to measure full employment on the basis of concrete wage growth, because wage growth accelerates when unemployment gets low enough that employers compete for workers. The Fed has a firm 2 percent inflation target, Bivens observed, but the criteria it uses to measure full employment are “not very firm.” Bivens and Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said they would like the Fed to tie a rate increase to annual wage growth of 3.5 percent, before inflation. Wages are currently 2.3 percent higher than they were at this time last year.
The Huffington Post June 18, 2015 -
People with prestigious, lucrative jobs produce children who do better on math, reading, and memory tests, according to an analysis released today by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, which looked at parent and teacher assessments of 18,000 children who started kindergarten in 2010.
“[The inequalities] represent bleak life prospects that portend serious problems for our society as a whole if we do not treat them as the moral and economic crisis they represent,” wrote Emma García, the report’s author. García used data from the National Center for Education Statistics, which is sponsoring a long-term study of a nationally representative sample of kids, through their fifth-grade year.
Bloomberg June 18, 2015 -
One easy form of boosting productivity would involve government spending in infrastructure such as roads, bridges, ports and airports. Josh Bivens, director of research at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, sees these investments as the “most reliable lever” to bolster productivity. Yet he notes that a 10-year, $2.5 trillion government infrastructure program would increase economic growth only 0.2 to 0.3 percent annually.
Associated Press June 17, 2015 -
401(k)s, in fact, were never supposed to be the main savings tool of the American worker. They arose, as the Economic Policy Institute has put it, as an “accident of history,” after one employer took advantage of a provision regarding deferred compensation in a 1978 tax law.
U.S. News & World Report June 17, 2015 -
Employees coming to work sick take longer to get well. Moreover, they spread their germs in the workplace. These setbacks reduce productivity by as much as 28 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
New York Observer June 17, 2015 -
Several outside voices have weighed in favoring a delay: The International Monetary Fund called on the Fed to wait for more concrete signs of wage or price inflation before raising its target rate. Based on IMF forecasts, that means no move until 2016. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute on Monday also argued that the Fed could take its time since wage growth has been stagnant.
The Washington Post June 16, 2015 -
EPI charts cited
The Boston Globe June 16, 2015 -
The Economic Policy Institute found that 682,900 net jobs were lost to Mexico by 2010, and that 415,000 of these were in the manufacturing sector.
Fortune June 16, 2015 -
The TPP does not stop participating countries from manipulating their currency. Currency manipulation artificially lowers the cost of U.S. imports and raises the cost of U.S. exports, which some, like the Economic Policy Institute, say is what has led to the high U.S. trade imbalance.
CBS News June 16, 2015 -
In cities like Chicago and Detroit, public housing “became a black program,” says the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, “because the Federal Housing Administration created a different program for whites, which was a single-family suburban program.”
The Washington Post June 15, 2015 -
A 2015 report by the Economic Policy Institute found that more than 30% of working Americans experience significant spikes and dips in their incomes, and the lowest income workers tend to be the most adversely affected. A report published by the JPMorgan Chase Institute this year called on government and corporations to develop tools that could help people manage their bottom line.
Los Angeles Times June 15, 2015