C.E.O. Pay: Blame It on the Next Guy
Recent studies suggest that exorbitant C.E.O. compensation isn’t primarily produced by greed or even the need to compensate invaluable talent, but rather firms benchmarking C.E.O. pay against other firms’ pay. That’s what Ray Fisman writes in Slate. One prominent C.E.O.’s raise therefore sends ripples of pay hikes through competing companies. Read More »
Tougher to Get Than a Nobel Prize in Economics
The University of Chicago likes to brag about its Nobel laureates. Well, my son’s kindergarten teacher Christina Hayward pulled off a feat that is far tougher statistically than winning the Nobel prize: she took one of ten Golden Apple awards given annually to the most outstanding Chicago-area teachers. Read More »
Stats in Love and War
But now Sean Gourley has derived a formula that not only describes how insurgent groups work, but could predict future attacks. Read More »
What Do a 19th-Century Brownstone and a Red-Cockaded Woodpecker Have in Common?
In a column we wrote a while back about the unintended consequences of well-meaning legislation, we highlighted one of the failures of the Endangered Species Act: in the lag time between when an animal’s habitat is announced to be under consideration for the E.S.A. and the protection actually goes into effect, landowners have incentive to prophylactically destroy the habitat. Read More »
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