It turned out to be a bad idea to look for research papers that explain why big companies routinely pay their top executives well into eight figures. That is, unless you had a few weeks to spend on it.
Studies on what is driving the growth in executive pay packages have been appearing regularly at least since the era of big paydays for CEOs commenced in the 1980s. By now there have to be dozens of them.
If people really bought the simplest explanation, that pay packages of $25 million or more at the top of corporate America come from a well-functioning labor market, then there would be far less for the professors to consider. But "CEOs have been getting paid fairly for their value" is less than fully persuasive.
So that's why there have been studies like the one you may remember from 2016 that found that the best-paid CEOs are more likely to preside over relatively poorly performing companies, at least based on stock performance. This conclusion came from the consulting and investment technology firm MSCI, but at least one university research team had gotten to a similar conclusion.
After finding another study related to the counterproductive effects of performance-based cash bonuses, that was enough material from this vein. Other search terms quickly turned up research from a few years ago that found another distinctly "nonmarket" explanation for higher CEO pay — how the CEOs feel about their social standing in their hometowns.
Just living near other CEOs turned out to be enough to get paid more. That's because after mixing with the other big dogs at the country club and fundraising balls, the CEOs demanded more pay than their buddies were making.
Yet another study concluded that the CEOs of "sin" companies like casino operators were paid a lot more than CEOs in other industries, as compensation for the social stigma from operating slot machines or selling cigarettes.
One paper stayed at the top of the pile because it had a simple and compelling headline, "Executive Pay: What Worked?" The authors of this one had looked back to when CEOs weren't paid all that much, from about 1940 into the 1970s, even as business was booming.