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2014 Equilar 100 CEO Pay Study

“The New York Times recently released its coverage of the Equilar 100 CEO Pay Study, an annual study of CEOs at the 100 largest U.S. publicly-traded companies provided exclusively by Equilar. Over the past eight years, Equilar has been the preferred data provider to The Times for executive compensation information. As part of this collaboration, Equilar provides data on compensation, professional history, and wealth events for executives of publicly traded companies. Additional information on executive connections, board service, and wealth data can be found in Equilar Atlas, an executive networking tool with profiles of more than 360,000 executives worldwide. To measure CEO compensation, The New York Times commissioned Equilar to compile and analyze pay data from corporate filings. The data set includes information for the chief executives at the 100 largest publicly traded companies as measured by revenue. To be included in the Equilar study, a company must be incorporated in the United States and must have filed a definitive proxy statement by April 4, 2014. For each executive, total compensation is calculated as the sum of base salary, discretionary and performance-based cash bonuses, the grant date value of stock and option awards, and other compensation. Other compensation typically includes benefits and perquisites. All data is taken from the Summary Compensation Table provided in each company’s proxy statement. If grant date values are not provided for option awards, Equilar’s research team calculated the value of stock option grants using the widely-accepted Black-Scholes methodology and the company’s own option valuation assumptions. Grant-date values represent the estimated value of new stock and option awards. Although companies disclose grant-date values for these awards, there is no guarantee that executives will realize these amounts. They may earn more or less depending on stock price changes. In the analysis, Equilar’s research team considered equity awards in the fiscal year they were granted. In some cases, especially in the financial sector, companies grant equity awards at the beginning of each fiscal year based on performance in the previous fiscal year. As such, the equity awards granted in a fiscal year should not be viewed as indicative of corporate performance in that same year. Percentage change in pay for each executive is calculated using compensation data from the previous fiscal year. For some CEOs, specifically new hires or the newly promoted, change in pay is listed as “n/a.”

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