Australia's highest-paid company boss, Macquarie Group's chief executive Nicholas Moore, took home $18.1 million last financial year, the majority of it a bonus based on hitting a record annual profit.
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But was it skill, or just luck?
A new academic paper calculates that 90 per cent of performance pay for executives is for luck rather than good management.
The result "stems from the fact that the variability of a firm's returns is typically much larger than the impact of the manager on the average return," wrote Professor Moshe Levy, the author of the statistical analysis published this week, in the Harvard Law School's Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation.
"The result is robust, and stems from the fundamental fact that chance plays a dominant role in determining firm performance."
Professor Levy is from the Jerusalem School of Business Administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
"A managerial decision that is followed by a positive outcome may be labeled in retrospect as a 'good decision', when in fact, the outcome as just a lucky realisation. However, the role of chance is usually fully acknowledged by management when a bad outcome is realised," he wrote.
He cited the Old Testament words of the Jewish intellectual King Solomon, who noted that "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all."
An August report by the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors found that bonuses are increasingly being used by listed Australian companies to boost managers' fixed pay, which has decreased slightly since changes to remuneration rules.
The "two-strikes" legislation, introduced in 2011 in response to concerns about soaring executive pay, means that shareholders can vote to overturn a board if it overpays management two years in a row.
In 2015, 93 per cent of the chief executives of the top 100 were awarded a bonus, as happened in 2008, which was the highest level in the survey's 15-year history.
ACSI chief executive Louise Davidson told the Herald at the time that bonuses paid should be for "exceptional' performance by a boss, and questioned if boards had allowed bonus hurdles to become less demanding.
"I think that some of the people in this survey had an exceptional year, but I think it's unlikely that they all did," Ms Davidson said.
In the US and UK, where two-strikes legislation doesn't exist, executive pay continues to climb.
Professor Levy cited US statistics that in 2014 the top 200 CEOs in the US received average compensation of $22.6 million, or about 480 times the average worker's salary.
He cites a body of academic research that suggests stratospheric executive pay is not the outcome of a competitive market for rare managerial talent, but "rather the result of skimming by managers and boards that cooperate with them."
As Leonard Cohen, another wise Jewish scholar, once sang, "the poor stay poor, the rich get rich: that's how it goes, everybody knows."
