Get the names and ticker symbols of the companies. Some information sources are The Wall Street Journal (see stock listings in Section C), the financial pages of many daily newspapers,

www.nyse.com, and www.nasdaq.com. The Wall Street Journal has stopped publishing so much information in its print edition, but now makes available a lot of information on www.wsjmarkets.com; this information is freely available.

1. Each of these two companies has five top executives, so there are ten top executives for the two companies combined. Find out the total compensation for each of the top five executives of each of the two companies. Their total compensation typically includes more than just salary. (Note: One easy way to do this used to be to go to Web site finance.yahoo.com, type in the ticker symbols, click on "profile," and print out how much the executives of the one company are paid, and then how much the executives of the other company are paid.) The most detailed information is available in the company's filings at the SEC, available at www.sec.gov, then find the company, then find a Form DEF 14A filing. The contents have changed over the years, but there is a summary table in there somewhere. For this purpose, all you need in the DEF 14A is that one page. I anticipate that some students will not read through this instruction, and therefore will not go to the DEF 14A which has the correct information, but instead will go to some other source which provides only base pay. Base pay is not total compensation. I further anticipate, based on experience, that some students will tell me the total combined compensation of all five top employees of a company, rather than the specified "total compensation for each of the top five executives...."
2. Find out the median household income in the state where the company has its headquarters. (Note: One easy way to do this is to go to any of various search engines including, but not limited to, Google at www.google.com or to various statistics sites, and search for "median household income.") You can also go to www.census.gov to see what information is available there. (A site,www.ntis.gov, has a lot of information available, but it might be difficult to find this specific information.) Some students have found median household income in the city where a company is headquartered (www.city-data.com), and other students have found median household income in the county where a company is headquartered. I like that level of detail, but I will be satisfied with median household income for the state. Notice that "median household income" is not the same thing as "median income," "average income," or "personal income." "Real median household income" is not the same thing as "median household

income." If the information source has both real and nominal information available, you want nominal median household income. Submit with your memo the one page for each company headquarters which shows the median household income you are citing.