High incomes in state monopoly industries have drawn extensive public concerns in China. The management of state-owned enterprises(SOEs) is motivated and empowered to set payment schemes in their own favor, resulting in the greater extent to which their senior executives are overpaid as compared with average workers. Hence, the level of unjustified high incomes is heterogeneous among employees of different income levels in state monopoly industries. Using Machado-Mata counterfactual decomposition method based on the regression of multiple quantiles, this paper measures the proportions of reasonable and unreasonable parts of pay gap between state monopoly industries and competitive industries. Our study found that the workforce of state monopoly industries are overpaid across various wage levels, while the extent to which they are overpaid increases with the rise of wage level. The implication is that compared with average workers, executives in state monopoly industries are overpaid to an even greater extent. This requires that the government focus on curbing the high executive income in addition to putting a lid on the gross payroll of SOEs in state monopoly industries. The fundamental strategy to resolving the excessive high income in state monopoly industries is to bring different types of SOEs under different corporate management models and income systems.
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