CEOs to Unskilled Workers Pay Ratio – Double what you think is ideal research finds

In their recent research, scheduled to be published in a forthcoming issue Perspectives on Psychological Science, Chulalongkorn University’s Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton investigate “what size gaps people desire” and whether those gaps are at all consistent among people from different countries and backgrounds.

It turns out that most people, regardless of nationality or set of beliefs, share similar sentiments about how much CEOs should be paid — and, for the most part, these estimates are markedly lower than the amounts company leaders actually earn.

Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) from December 2012, in which respondents were asked to both “estimate how much a chairman of a national company (CEO), a cabinet minister in a national government, and an unskilled factory worker actually earn” and how much each person should earn, the researchers calculated the median ratios for the full sample and for 40 countries separately.

For the countries combined, the ideal pay ratio for CEOs to unskilled workers was 4.6 to 1; the estimated ratio was about double, at 10 to 1. But there were some differences country to country. People in Denmark, for example, estimated the ratio to be 3.7 to 1, with an ideal ratio being 2 to 1. In South Korea, the estimated gap was much larger at 41.7 to 1. The ideal gap in Taiwan was particularly high, at 20 to 1. This is what the breakdown looks like, country by country:

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at CEOs Get Paid Too Much, According to Pretty Much Everyone in the World – Gretchen Gavett – Harvard Business Review.