The DOI matches its Crossref record.
CEO Pay and Appointments: A Market-Based Explanation for Recent Trends
Abstract
Very few business topics attract as much public attention as the paychecks of top executive officers in the largest U.S. companies. Undoubtedly, part of this interest has been fueled by the large and continuous increases in chief executive officers ’ (CEOs) compensation over the past three decades. Even ignoring the more recent escalation in the use of executive stock options (Brian Hall and Kevin J. Murphy, 2000, 2003), the base salaries and bonuses of Forbes 800 CEOs increased from an average of $700,000 in 1970 (in 2002-constant dollars) to over $2.2 million in 2000. 1 During the same period, the ratio of CEO cash compensation to average pay for production workers increased from about 25 in 1970 to nearly 90 in 2000. 2 The most prevalent explanation in popular press for this trend is the “fat cat ” theory, a variant of which has been espoused among academics by Lucian Bebchuk, Jesse Fried, and
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Frydman, C., & Jenter, D. (2010) · Annual Review of Financial Economics · doi:10.1146/annurev-financial-120209-133958 · Cited by 542
Executive Pay, Hidden Compensation and Managerial Entrenchment
Kuhnen, C. M., & Zwiebel, J. H. (2007) · doi:10.2139/ssrn.972622 · Cited by 116
Metadata
- Authors
- Murphy, K. J., & Zábojník, J.
- Venue
- American Economic Review
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2004-04-01
- Volume
- 94
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 192-196
- ISSN
- 0002-8282 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2132935253
- Cited by
- 613
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 51.06
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: CEO Pay and Appointments: A Market-Based Explanation for Recent Trends. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1257/0002828041302262
- The paper
- Murphy, K. J., & Zábojník, J. (2004). CEO Pay and Appointments: A Market-Based Explanation for Recent Trends. American Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1257/0002828041302262
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
