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. Sat, 27 Jun 2026 11:30:45 +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 CEO Pay Levels in the U.S. Are Converging Amid Increased Benchmarking – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 CEO Pay Levels in the U.S. Are Converging Amid Increased Benchmarking https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/06/25/ceo-pay-levels-in-the-u-s-are-converging-amid-increased-benchmarking/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ceo-pay-levels-in-the-u-s-are-converging-amid-increased-benchmarking https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/06/25/ceo-pay-levels-in-the-u-s-are-converging-amid-increased-benchmarking/#respond Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:31:42 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=182107?d=20260624155441EDT Posted by Torsten Jochem (University of Amsterdam), Gaizka Ormazaba (IESE Business School), and Anjana Rajamani (Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University), on Thursday, June 25, 2026
Editor's Note:

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

The pay levels of CEOs of publicly listed firms in the U.S. have converged sharply over the last two decades, amid the increasing use of compensation benchmarking against other firms with a similar profile.

In a new paper, we looked at a wide sample of publicly listed U.S. firms over the period 1996 to 2023, tracking the variation in pay across chief executives. After peaking around the year 2000, we find the cross-sectional variation in CEO pay levels has declined almost 40% since 2007. Pay has converged toward the median at both tails of the distribution curve, and that is the case at an economy-wide level, across different industries, within groups of similar-sized companies in the same industries, and within compensation peer groups.

(more…)

]]> https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/06/25/ceo-pay-levels-in-the-u-s-are-converging-amid-increased-benchmarking/feed/ 0