Boards packed with CEOs set each other’s pay higher

Evidence

Why has CEO pay skyrocketed? Their pay is set by a company’s board of directors, which is stacked with other CEOs and CFOs (chief financial officers), who are all acting in their class interests. For example, current or former chief executives make up ten members of Warner Bros. Discovery’s twelve-member board, ten out of eleven members at Disney, and eight out of ten at Comcast. As Duménil and Lévy claim in their analysis of the disciplining functions of neoliberalism, “top management is metamorphosed into financial management.” — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 120

Categorization

• XREF: Interlocking directorates and class-interest pay-setting connect to the broader literature on elite cohesion and corporate governance (e.g., Domhoff, Mizruchi). — connects to: Stock-based executive pay widened CEO-worker income gaps. — Gerald F. Davis & Suntae Kim, Financialization of the Economy, 56; Shareholder-value incentive pay enriched managers more than shareholders themselves — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 54