Welcome the CEO Pay Ratio

Posted by Marc Hodak on August 6, 2015 under Executive compensation, Stupid laws | 4 Comments to Read

The CEO Pay Ratio mandated by Dodd-Frank is finally here. The rule sounds simple enough: Companies must disclose the ratio of their CEO’s pay to that of their median worker. Interesting information, perhaps, but the SEC supposedly exists for a more lofty purpose than mandating nice-to-know data. It must, by law, act in the interests of investors. In fact, the Administrative Procedures Act requires the SEC to “base . . . decisions on the best reasonably obtainable scientific, technical, economic, and other information concerning the need for, and consequences of, the intended regulation.”

The CEO Pay Ratio rule is, indeed, of great interest to certain people. Union leaders believe that the rule will give them another crowbar with which to negotiate their members’ wages and benefits. Class warriors believe it will give them more ammo to shame corporations into reducing inequality. Fair enough. But the SEC does not normally allow itself to be used by unions for getting involved in labor relations, or by class warriors in anti-corporate crusading. So, why are they bothering with this rule?

Quite simply, because Dodd-Frank requires them to. The CEO Pay Ratio provision was inserted into the law, without debate, at the last minute by Senator Menendez. His rationale, explained after the fact, was, “This simple benchmark will help investors monitor both how a company treats its average workers and whether its executive pay is reasonable.”

How, exactly, will this “simple benchmark” help investors do those things? What number, or range, for this ratio tells an investor that a company is treating its average workers well or poorly, or that a company is paying its CEO reasonably (given that CEO pay is already thoroughly disclosed)? What economic or financial standards can be created using this or other data to enable investors to figure these things out?

As someone who has been asking this over the five years it has been debated, I can assure you that those questions have never been answered, neither by the rules proponents nor by the investors they claim to want to help. That’s because there is no logical basis for believing that the pay ratio can usefully inform investors either with regards to the company’s treatment of workers or the reasonableness of their executives’ pay. Consequently, there is no scientific or economic evidence that this ratio, alone or in combination with any other data, can be used to judge how well the company is being managed, or otherwise be related to company value—i.e., the nominal concern of investors. The Pay Ratio provides no more useful information than the ratio between the company’s highest cost office space versus its average cost of warehouse space, or between its highest cost commodity inputs versus its average cost of materials.

In other words, the SEC is simply being used in an experiment in social engineering. The expectation is that this ratio will shame boards into changing how they pay their CEOs. That goal might have some redeeming value if this experiment hadn’t already been tried, twice. The “shaming” theory was, in fact, largely behind disclosure rules enacted in 1992 and in 2006. A rational person would have looked at these and similar results, and decided it was time to try another hypothesis. Alas, it appears we are not dealing with rational persons. So today, ideology trumps science.