CEOs are an illiquid market, and demand for CEOs is pretty inelastic (companies need but one CEO after all). It's not a market which can reach price equilibrium

CEOs are an illiquid market, and demand for CEOs is pretty inelastic (companies need but one CEO after all). It's not a market which can reach price equilibrium. If you expand your horizon somewhat to C-suite in general, it seems that demand for C-suite has tended to increase over time. If you also consider that C-suite is to some degree a Veblen good (demand increases as price goes up) [1], that makes sense under economic laws. Worker pay, unlike executive pay, is going to be considered a significant cost center, and business will higher fewer workers if individual pay is growing too quickly, making worker pay act like regular goods and not Veblen goods. [1] The framework for setting CEO salaries tends to be "take the median CEO pay, add a little extra because our CEO's clearly better than average..."