For this project, I chose to examine additional variables that could be considered to be affect consumer welfare by examining forces at play in the distribution of power in markets. Given the opaque nature of financial data, it is difficult for the average person to gain a larger understanding of capital and market power by different sectors and industries. I worked on combining many sources of data to map revenue, market cap, CEO compensation, number of employees, employee compensation to individual sectors and industries and plan to continuously release this data as publicly as possible.
In a painstakingly manual effort, I dug into the Chief Executive Officers for every Top 50 Fortune 500 for the last 20 years. Largely what I learned was that shifts in leadership are driven by scandal and/or unfair compensation from CEOs, and that many companies in the last 20 years have seen multiple shifts in leadership post Dodd-Frank.
In combing through the Fortune 500 archive, I found all Fortune 500 companies from 1955-2019 and was able to combine it with the available Fortune 500 data for 2020. I mapped was able to map that data to the 11 S&P sectors to build a color key to see which sectors were
Fortune 500 archive industry map available here.
##CEO Pay Ratio Finally, I scraped and cleaned up CEO compensation, employee compensation, number of employees, and revenue share/market cap to examine sector and industry wide standards in "CEO pay ratio" - the ratio that of how much more a CEO makes than his employees.
** Demo available here: https://observablehq.com/d/1376cdb30f06b5fe **
- Justice Department on market and monopoly power
- History of the SEC
- Fortune 500 archive
- Fortune 500 2020
- NYU Stern S&P industries
- Taxes from the Center for Public Integrity
- Economic Policy Institute: CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978
- SEC adopts rule for pay ratio disclosure
- Bloomberg on CPR
- Work Chrom
- Salary.com
- Forbes industry power over time