Public Program: The Portman Lecture in the Spirit of Entrepreneurship - "Are CEOs Overpaid?"

Please join us for the Portman Lecture in the Spirit of Entrepreneurship, "Are CEOs Overpaid?" at Filene Auditorium in Moore Hall at 4:30 pm on Tuesday, April 14.

As income inequality continues to dominate America's socioeconomic issues, the spotlight remains on the top one percent of earners. Executive compensation continues to be highly scrutinized by economists, policymakers, the press, and the rest of society. CEO compensation varies by firm, and it is sometimes difficult to decipher why exactly executive income is at these levels. Are CEOs paid based on their performance in competitive markets, or are they overpaid due to imperfect markets and inattentive boards of directors?

Co-sponsored by the Political Economy Project, the Rockefeller Center brings together a panel for the Portman Lecture in the Spirit of Entrepreneurship that will feature two different perspectives on this issue by leading academic researchers. This debate will feature Lucian Bebchuk, an expert on the fields of corporate governance, law and finance, and law and economics and Steven K. Kaplan, one of the world's top researchers on private equity, venture capital, and income inequality. This intriguing debate will be moderated by Douglas Irwin, the John Sloan Dickey Third Century Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor in the Department of Economics.

Lucian Bebchuk is the William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance and Director of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School. Bebchuk is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also the author or coauthor of more than one hundred research papers, as well the widely acclaimed book, Pay Without Performance: the Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation.
 
Steven N. Kaplan is the Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. The faculty director of Booth's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Professor Kaplan teaches advanced MBA, law and executive courses in entrepreneurial finance, private equity, corporate finance, corporate governance, and wealth management. In addition, he co-founded the entrepreneurship program at Booth, which has successfully spawned over one hundred companies.

Douglas Irwin is the author of several books, including Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s, Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression, and Free Trade Under Fire. In addition to teaching at Dartmouth, he holds a position as a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has also served on the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.