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  3. In 1965, America’s big companies had a hell of a year. The stock market was

In 1965, America’s big companies had a hell of a year. The stock market was

游客2025-01-12  32
问题     In 1965, America’s big companies had a hell of a year. The stock market was booming. Sales were rising briskly, profit margins were fat, and corporate profits as a percentage of GDP were at an all-time high. Almost half a century later, some things look much the same: big American companies have had a hell of a year, with the stock market soaring, margins strong, and profits hitting a new all-time high. But there’s one very noticeable difference. In 1965, CEOs at big companies earned on average about 20 times as much as their typical employee. These days, CEOs earn about 270 times as much.
    That huge gap between the top and the middle is the result of a boom in executive compensation, which rose 876 per cent between 1978 and 2011. In response, we’ve had a host of regulatory reforms designed to curb executive pay. The latest of these is a rule, unveiled by the SEC last month, requiring companies to disclose the ratio of the CEO’s pay to that of the median worker. The idea is that, once the disparity is made public, companies will be less likely to award outsized pay packages.
    Faith in disclosure has been crucial to the regulation of executive pay since the 1930s. More recently, rules have made companies detail the size and the structure of compensation packages and have enforced transparency about the kinds of comparisons they rely on to determine salaries. The result is that shareholders today know far more about CEO compensation than ever before. There’s only one problem: even as companies are disclosing more and more, executive pay keeps going up and up.
    This isn’ t a coincidence: the drive for transparency has actually helped fuel the spiralling salaries. For one thing, it gives executives a good idea of how much they can get away with asking for. A more crucial reason, though, has to do with the way boards of directors set salaries. As Charles Elson and Craig Ferrere write, boards at most companies use what’ s called " peer benchmarking. " They look at the CEO salaries at peer-group firms, and then peg their CEO’s pay to the 50th, 75th, or 90th percentile of the peer group—never lower. This leads to the so-called Lake Wobegon effect: every CEO gets treated as above average. "Relying on peer-group comparisons, the way boards do, mathematically guarantees that pay is going to go up," Elson told me.
    On top of this, peer-group comparisons aren’ t always honest: boards can be too cozy with CEOs and may tweak the comparisons to justify overpaying. A recent study shows that boards tend to include as peers companies that are bigger than they are and that pay CEOs more. The system is skewed by so-called "leapfroggers," the few CEOs in a given year who, whether by innate brilliance or by dumb luck, end up earning astronomical salaries. Those big paydays reset the baseline expectations for everyone else.
    This isn’t just an American problem. Nor is it primarily a case of boards being helplessly in thrall to a company’ s executives. Boards are far more independent of management than they used to be, and it’s notable that a CEO hired from outside a company—typically gets 20 to 25 per cent more than an inside candidate. The real issues are subtler, though no less insidious. Some boards remain convinced of what Elson calls "superstar theory": they think that CEOs can work their magic anywhere, and must be overpaid to stay. In addition, Elson said, "if you pay below average, it makes it look as if you’d hired a below-average CEO, and what board wants that?"
    Transparent pricing has perverse effects in other fields. In a host of recent cases, public disclosure of the prices that hospitals charge for various procedures has ended up driving prices up rather than down. And the psychological causes in both situations seem similar. We tend to be uneasy about bargaining in situations where the stakes are very high: do you want the guy doing your neurosurgery, or running your company, to be offering discounts? Better, in the event that something goes wrong, to be able to tell yourself that you spent all you could. And overspending is always easier when you’ re spending someone else’ s money. Corporate board members are disbursing shareholder funds; most patients have insurance to foot the bill.
    Sunlight is supposed to be the best disinfectant. But there’ s something naive about the new SEC rule, which presumes that full disclosure will embarrass companies enough to restrain executive pay. As Elson told me, "People who can ask to be paid a hundred million dollars are beyond embarrassment. " More important, as long as the system for setting pay is broken, more disclosure makes things worse instead of better. We don’t need more information. We need boards of directors to step up and set pay themselves, instead of outsourcing the job to their peers. The rest of us don’ t get to live in Lake Wobegon. CEOs shouldn’t, either. [br] Which of the following can be concluded from the last paragraph?
选项 A、With Lake Wobegon effect, CEOs will always receive salaries above average.
B、Neither workers nor company CEOs should live in Lake Wobegon.
C、Boards of directors should take measures to standardize CEOs’ pay.
D、More information about transparent pricing will not lead to embarrassment.
答案 C
解析
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