The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition a new research paper written by William Lazonick of the University of Massachusetts Lowell says that in 2012, the 500 highest-paid executives in the United States received an average pay of $24.4-million (U.S.). The Globe's Eric Reguly writes the money is derived 52 per cent from stock options and 26 per cent from stock awards. "The more one delves into the reasons for the huge increase in open-market [share] repurchase since the mid-1980s, the clearer it becomes that the only plausible reason for this mode of resource allocation is that the very executives who make the buyback decisions have much to gain personally through their stock-based pay," Mr. Lazonick said. Between 1948 and 1983, when regulations severely limited the size of buybacks, real compensation per hour and gains in productivity per hour closely tracked one other. That is no longer the case. In the early 1980s, a significant gap between productivity and wages emerged and kept getting wider. The trigger point came in 1982, when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission used Rule 10b-18 to legalize buybacks. Pope Francis has made criticism of the excesses of capitalism one of his themes.