The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:34:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Why Have CEO Pay Levels Become Less Diverse? – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Why Have CEO Pay Levels Become Less Diverse? https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/11/24/why-have-ceo-pay-levels-become-less-diverse/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-have-ceo-pay-levels-become-less-diverse https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/11/24/why-have-ceo-pay-levels-become-less-diverse/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2020 14:31:20 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=134574?d=20201124093120EST Posted by Torsten Jochem (University of Amsterdam), Gaizka Ormazabal (University of Navarra), and Anjana Rajamani (Erasmus University Rotterdam), on Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Editor's Note:

Torsten Jochem is Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Amsterdam; Gaizka Ormazabal is Associate Professor of Accounting and Control at University of Navarra IESE Business School; and Anjana Rajamani is Associate Professor of Finance at Erasmus University Rotterdam School of Management. This post is based on their recent paper.

In our working paper, we examine the evolution of cross-sectional variation in CEO pay levels.  Using a wide sample of over 5,000 U.S. public firms, spanning from 2002 to 2018, we document a new stylized fact: Over the last decade, the variation in CEO pay levels across firms (i.e., the “second moment of pay”) has declined precipitously. The decline in CEO pay level variation not only holds at the economy-level but also within industry groups, within industry-size groups, and in firms’ compensation peer groups (see Figure 1).

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