The Salary Gap Between Stingy and Generous Companies Is Growing

And it’s a big factor in rising inequality.

by

Walter Frick

by

Walter Frick

September 22, 2014

What’s behind rising income inequality: the pay difference between janitors and CEOs, or the gap between how well different employers pay each position? Income inequality in the U.S. has historically more about the former. But a new NBER paper argues that the increase in inequality in recent years is actually driven largely by the latter.

Walter Frick is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, where he was formerly a senior editor and deputy editor of HBR.org. He is the founder of Nonrival, a newsletter where readers make crowdsourced predictions about economics and business. He has been an executive editor at Quartz as well as a Knight Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and an Assembly Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He has also written for The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, The Boston Globe, and the BBC, among other publications.

The Salary Gap Between Stingy and Generous Companies Is Growing

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