After Jensen and Murphy (1990), Congress passed Section 162(m) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code (1993), making it cost effective to pay executives in equity. As a result, executives had a financial incentive to focus their efforts on increasing stock price. In the short run, some executives even manipulated accounting numbers (Enron, Global Crossing) to achieve the goal. NYT article 2005 In the long run, executives outsourced labor to reduce costs and then used the resulting savings to repurchase stock, thus increasing their own compensation as well as enriching shareholders. Since 2018 corporations have invested heavily in buybacks, including over $1 trillion from 2018-2019. Recently, stock buybacks and shareholder primacy have come under scrutiny with leading economists and politicians citing that it has hurt workers and not resulted in corporations increasing value to consumers.