A picture last Sunday with an article about executive compensation trends in Japan was published in error.
These compensation trends for managers and investment professionals do not result from shortages of college graduates to enter these fields.
Overall, "CFOs are enjoying larger pay gains than other C-level executives", concludes the latest annual review of compensation trends by CFO Magazine, a sister publication of The Economist.
Aaron Boyd, the director of research at Equilar, the executive compensation data firm based in Redwood City, Calif., that has reviewed executive compensation trends annually for Sunday Business, said Mr. Cook's pay was unique.
Some consultants are hired by banks merely to provide data on industry compensation trends, or to rubber-stamp the decisions of the banks' internal compensation teams, while others are more directly involved in setting pay levels.
Available only to each specific family -- and not in some reference-book compilation available for the world to leaf through -- the neat, user-friendly dossiers include a victim's résumé, job supervisors, benefits package and company compensation trends.
Watson Wyatt, a consulting firm that tracks compensation trends, published survey data last week that found that 23percentt of companies planned layoffs in the next year, down from 26percentthatat said they planned to do so in October.
"The median bonus has declined more than 43%, and over a third of the CEOs didn't receive a bonus at all," says David Chun, chief executive of Equilar, a San Mateo, Calif.-based research firm that tracks compensation trends.
How You Can Address this Fear This is where researching compensation trends and gathering market data is extremely valuable.
Though not universally true – Salesforce.com Inc. founder Marc Benioff was the fifth-highest-paid CEO last year – founders typically make less money than other CEOs, often because more pay wouldn't be much of an incentive, said Steven Bank, a law professor at UCLA who has studied executive compensation trends.
