Do CEOs Produce for Shareholders?

The reporting of pay ratios between CEOs and median workers has drawn considerable attention to the enormous gap. Most of this has taken a moral tone, noting that would take the typical worker hundreds of years, or in some cases, more than a thousand years to earn as much as the company's CEO gets in a year. While there are certainly important moral questions here, it is also important to ask a simple economic question.

Are the highly paid CEOs actually producing returns for shareholders? Thi...