A few years ago, finance professor Alex Edmans heard a witness speaking to the UK’s Select Committee on Business refer to a piece of research on CEO pay. He rather liked the sound of it. It appeared to have found that the smaller the gap between the pay of a CEO and the pay of their average worker, the more their firm outperforms. That chimed nicely with some of Edmans’ own research and with what most of us would like to believe: Equality is good, greed is bad.

The select committee was keen too. The comments made their way into their final report on executive pay levels in the UK as “clear academic evidence that high wage disparities harm productivity and company performance.”