The market value is set by the board of directors, not CEOs.

Furthermore, supposing there were some sort of absentee owner effect (boards of directors are comprised of other CEOs, and they conspire to raise each other's pay), you'd expect to see a different market value in closely held corporations. Strangely, the price of a CEO for a closely held corporation closely tracks the price of a CEO for absentee shareholders.

http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

The obvious way to fix this is with increased shareholder activism (ala Gordon Gekko), and reducing regulations on hostile takeovers. Possibly also regulating things like poison pills, staggered board elections, etc. Do you favor such rule changes? If not, why not?

I believe the salary transparency requirement for CEOs was the best thing that ever happened to them. It's easy to negotiate a raise if you know what the other guy is making.

This will be unpopular but I think all salaries should be made public. This would allow a lot of people to negotiate better salaries.

This one is tricky. H1B visa holder salaries are transparent. And, they tend to make less than their US citizen peers. But, I guess it would need to be transparent for everyone for it to work out. There have been companies that have done it, but they've often already been focused on treating everyone fairly before or as part of the move to transparency. If the goal of the company is not to engender a team spirit by treating everybody as well as possible, but instead to maximize profits, then it would likely tend toward executives trying to keep pay low across all employees and would limit their willingness to hire outliers who demand very high salaries.

I don't know, is what I think I'm trying to say. There hasn't been a lot of data...very few companies are open about the salaries they pay, and there is a definitely hesitation among employees about discussing their salary (and it is often discouraged by the company, to boot).

I think this merely reflects the belief (a mistaken belief, according to some data) that a "great CEO" can make or break a company, and can make huge differences in the bottom line. Companies that don't have those huge pay disparities, and the data linked in the original article, seem to indicate that belief is not true.

We have developed a tolerance for executives being paid extravagantly just in the past generation, or so. It wasn't always the case, and it is at least as much a function of what people are willing to accept as what the market necessitates.