Over the past twenty years there has been a dramatic increase in both CEO pay and the wealth of the richest Americans. We hypothesize that the increase in CEO pay is due to the same economy-wide factors that have increased the asset value of the wealthiest Americans. We test this hypothesis by...

In contrast to the recent past, there is now widespread concern about the apparent excesses of some pay structures in corporate businesses. Top pay has risen much faster than average levels of pay in the last twenty years. This is in part the consequence of globalisation and developments in...

I develop measures of firm-level pay disparity and examine their relation to firm performance. Using comprehensive compensation data for a large sample of firms, I find no statistically significant relation between the ratio of CEO-to-mean employee compensation and performance. I next create...

The articles explores the connection between exorbitant executive compensation and the growing income inequality in our country. It discusses the tradition legal attempts to rein in corporate remuneration as well as the more recent “Say-on-Pay” right given shareholders in the Dodd-Frank Wall...

In recent decades, many countries experienced both a rise in top income shares and an increase of income inequality among the top earners. In this paper, I study the role of international trade as a catalyst for this development and analyze the associated welfare effects. I build a simple...