, Columnist
Wall Street Pays Its Workers to Suffer
Wall Street pays its employees more than other industries because the jobs trend to be more stressful than most and the industry can avoid the premium.
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Why do people on Wall Street get paid so much? It could be because Wall Streeters have generally high skills. Finance people tend to be good at using computers and working with numbers, but also at networking and forming business relationships. But a new study shows that there really is something special about Wall Street -- when a worker moves from another industry into finance, his or her wages jump by an average of 37 percent. Even secretaries get paid more on Wall Street.
So what's going on? The study's authors hypothesize that "rent sharing" is the cause. In the words of Matt O'Brien of the Washington Post: