The data in the latest executive pay survey from the AFL-CIO effectively undercut the case for excessive pay that emanates regularly from CEO flacks — and back up the new Dodd-Frank reform that requires major firms to disclose their pay ratios between top execs and typical workers.
Stanford’s Sean Reardon starts out his latest research, on the achievement gap between students from rich families and poor, with a question no one has yet asked: Has this educational gap grown as the dollar gap between high- and low-income U.S. families has widened?
The United States once taxed the nation’s wealthiest at substantially higher rates than today. In those high tax years, this new Tax Day report from the Institute for Policy Studies documents, Americans prospered. And the federal government never went begging.
Britain’s Equality Trust has begun a new series on what academic investigators have to tell us about economic inequality’s impact on society. The just-released first of these research briefs explores the powerfully strong links between grand income divides and violent crime.
The hedge fund industry’s top trade journal has just released its annual listing of this financial sector’s 25 highest earners. The most stunning stat in this year’s release: a $4.9 billion payoff for 2010′s top hedge fund manager, about a billion over the previous personal hedge fund record.
What impact has the Great Recession had on America’s wealth distribution? Researchers at the Federal Reserve have taken a stab at that question in recent weeks. And now, using a different approach, so have researchers at the Economic Policy Institute.
Two scholars have just released the first detailed calculations on the total payoff that went to top high-finance CEOs in the eight years before the U.S. economy crashed in 2008. Over that span, the new numbers reveal, the CEOs at 14 major financial institutions took home $2.7 billion.
Over recent decades, America’s most basic public policy choices, on everything from taxes to trade, have served to disadvantage working people and lavish luxuries on rich ones. No one has detailed the impact of those decisions better than economists at the Economic Policy Institute.
If America’s business leaders spoke Norwegian, President Obama might not have to beg them to do the right thing. A new report offers a fascinating window into the Scandinavian business mind. Equality, many Nordic entrepreneurs believe, gives them a competitive edge.
Does inequality matter? The Economist poses that question — in an online debate that dovetails with the magazine’s January 22 cover report on the global mega wealthy. Rising inequality is making it ever easier, one contributor posits, for the rich to rig the economic game in their favor.