How the pursuit of shareholder value weakened the economy

[stpioc]

2) Companies are not run better
There seems to be little link between performance and pay, Robert Reich cites a study:

Professors Michael J. Cooper of the University of Utah, Huseyin Gulen of Purdue University, and P. Raghavendra Rau of the University of Cambridge, recently found that companies with the highest-paid CEOs returned about 10 percent less to their shareholders than do their industry peers.

Bryce Covert cites another one:

Equilar, an executive compensation consultancy, compared the salaries of 200 highly paid CEOs to their companies’ performance based on things like profitability, revenue, and stock return. Rather than showing a clear trend line linking pay and performance, the data is scattered. In fact, chief executive pay is only 1 percent based on stock performance, with 99 percent based on other things entirely.

They got a graph looking like this: