Corporate Inequality Framework
How do the largest US corporations contribute to inequality?
This research report summarizes the framework and findings of a first-of-its-kind assessment of the inequality performance of the largest 200 US corporations. It is the result of a multi-year project, launched to understand and analyze how large corporations are contributing to inequality trends. As the dominant actors of the US (and global) economy, large corporations influence how and where economic output is generated and distributed, and they play a critical role in shaping global and domestic inequality. Their impact on inequality is neither accidental nor peripheral but rather intricately linked to their core business models and strategies.
Assessing the inequality “footprint” of individual companies is an inherently complex endeavor. Our framework attempts to find a middle ground between embracing this complexity while keeping the data manageable, and useful for interested stakeholders. Taking a holistic approach, we apply a variety of inequality lenses (economic, social, political, environmental) and analyze different assessment levels (policy, performance, disclosure). The result is a holistic Corporate Inequality Framework (CIF) that analyzes corporations across 78 indicators divided into four pillars: People, Power, Profits, and Planet.