Executive Pay

The career of New York Stock Exchange Head Richard Grasso came to an end yesterday amid a furor related to his enormous compensation package (see here). Of course, the question is not how big his package was, but how much value did he add to the NYSE and was his fee competitive? Hard to say about the first since the NYSE is a non-profit corporation, but Grasso ($140M pay out) would be paid more than Jefferey Barbakow, who, according to Forbes’ magazine (click here, then click on “view list by rank”), was the highest paid executive of a publicly held firm in 2002 at $116M.