During the pandemic, government support was meant to protect jobs and businesses. But companies receiving that support were also linked to a sharp rise in top executives’ pay soon afterward. The study examines how senior executives at the UK’s largest publicly listed companies financially benefited from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, the government’s furlough support for workers.

It finds that receiving furlough support in 2020 was associated with significant increases in chief executive performance pay and total remuneration in the year immediately after the pandemic’s height. The wider idea is called elite welfare: income created through government policy can function like welfare when it reaches a small, privileged minority.

Executive pay had already been falling before the pandemic, then dropped sharply in the year support began before recovering. That timing matters because it provides the starting point for asking whether wage support changed how much senior executives were paid. But the question of how government support benefited senior executives in larger companies has largely been ignored in public debates about that support.

Research on corporate welfare has often made the corporation its primary unit of analysis, effectively centring the corporation rather than its individual beneficiaries. The question of how government support to business benefited senior executives in larger companies has largely been ignored in public debates.

A related question concerns beneficiaries strategically well placed to extract value from supported corporations, and the role of corporate welfare in supporting elite welfare. That omission matters because support reaching corporations may also support the welfare of elites and deepen economic inequality.

So the study follows the money: it examines the relationship between government grants received by the UK’s largest publicly owned companies and changes in executive pay. The comparison asks whether pay changed differently before and after the pandemic for companies that received support and companies that did not.

The study finds a significant positive short-term impact on executive pay. It then uses elite welfare to connect this result with older forms of advantage created by policy, including tax benefits, political favouritism, and assets transferred to elites at a discount.

The comparison looks at companies that received furlough support and those that did not, both before support was available and after it was received. This makes it possible to compare the change in pay before and after support, and then compare that change between supported and unsupported companies.

Before the pandemic, pay trends for chief executives and finance directors showed no significant divergence between the two groups, supporting the comparison. The results focus on the change from twenty-nineteen to twenty-twenty and twenty-twenty-one to twenty-twenty-two.

The upper part shows chief executive pay, and the lower part shows finance director pay. For chief executives in companies that received furlough support in twenty-twenty only, the figure shows a positive, significant difference in pay change.

But the increase did not continue into a second year. The study found no statistically significant effects when it examined the change from twenty-nineteen to twenty-twenty and twenty-twenty-two to twenty-twenty-three. That means the effects were limited to the year immediately after support was introduced, with no delayed effects even among companies receiving support for two years.

One possible explanation is the design of the support scheme. Many support schemes, including the furlough scheme, did not include conditions restricting executive pay. Many support schemes, including the CJRS, lacked conditions restricting executive pay, which might have moderated executive compensation while companies received that support.

But the paper says the larger point is that public policy and public spending can create opportunities for extracting income, raising questions about whom welfare states redistribute money toward. The paper calls this pattern elite welfare: government policy can quietly support political and economic elites, alongside its more familiar role of helping people facing hardship.

This idea brings hidden benefits for wealthy people into questions about public spending, inequality, and the way governments manage both insecurity and privilege. For people outside the field, the practical message is to examine how government policy can function as covert social support for political and economic elites.

And ask whether these practices bring together otherwise unconnected forms of governance that lock in and compound wealth and income inequalities. The paper argues that public support can benefit people already at the top, not only those it was designed to protect.

That makes executive pay part of the welfare story—and a question of who public money ultimately serves.