RECENT INCOME TRENDS FOR TOP EXECUTIVES: EVIDENCE FROM TAX RETURN DATA

We examine income trends for top executives, focusing on the years 2000 to 2010, with special emphasis on the period surrounding the Great Recession. First, we merge Execucomp executive compensation records with IRS tax records. We compare incomes from our Execucomp sample to top incomes reported by Piketty and Saez (2003). We disaggregate executive income trends by industry, showing which industries are driving the divergence in top executive incomes. We compare our results to findings from Bakija, Cole, and Heim (2010) and Kaplan and Rauh (2010), who examine trends in top incomes for broad occupation and industry categories for years prior to the Great Recession. We also decompose these income trends by income source to see which components are driving the observed changes. We find that stock options are by far the most volatile component of executive pay. Options are the key driver of both short-term swings and longer-term trends in top executive pay. However, stock awards are also a large and growing component. We find much greater variation in income across years than across industries. Executive incomes are most volatile at the very top of income distribution. In general, trends for top executives in fi nance and non-finance industries are quite similar; however; for those above the 99.9th percentile of the income distribution, the decline in income from 2006 to 2009 was much more pronounced for executives in finance

A Study of Prairie Reconstructions in the Eastern Dakotas

Two studies of reconstruction processes in the Northern Great Plains (NGP) are presented. The first study is a retrospective study on United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) managed lands seeded with a high diversity (>15 species) seed mix. Sites were grouped by available management history to find management tactics which may trend sites towards a more successful state. A large amount of variation was captured. Results showed uncontrollable factors may be driving the outcomes of these reconstructions. Attention should be paid to uncontrolled and landscape factors to drive management of each site. A second study investigates a possible method to establish specialized seed mixes. Precision Prairie Restoration (PPR) was used to establish five repetitions of six treatments. Early results are optimistic with several target species becoming established. Future sampling will be needed to determine success of this method

Changes in Retirement Savings During the COVID Pandemic

This paper documents changes in retirement saving patterns at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We construct a large panel of US tax data, including tens of millions of person-year observations, and measure retirement savings contributions and withdrawals. We use these data to document several important changes in retirement savings patterns during the pandemic relative to prior years, and we compare these results to changes in savings patterns during the Great Recession. We find that, unlike during the Great Recession, contributions by individuals to retirement savings vehicles did not meaningfully decline. Additionally, driven by the suspension of required minimum distribution rules, IRA withdrawals substantially declined in 2020 for those older than age 72. Finally, likely due to the partial suspension of the early withdrawal penalty, employer-plan withdrawals increased for those under age 60