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Among 33 publicly traded companies based in the St. Louis area, 18 paid their chief executives more in 2016 than in 2015, while 15 paid them less.

The decline often matched the company’s performance. Aegion, a pipeline repair company based in Chesterfield, cited “challenging market conditions� in explaining why CEO Charles Gordon’s to $2.5 million.

At other companies, the pay decline is a matter of timing. David Hatfield at shaver and sunscreen maker Edgewell Personal Care got a whopping $7.9 million worth of stock and options when he became CEO in 2015. Since he didn’t get a similar award this year, his fell 74 percent.

Overall, the CEOs of St. Louis had a good year. For the 28 men and women who headed their companies during all of 2015 and 2016, median pay rose 22 percent to $3.7 million.

The compensation packages range from the nearly $22 million earned by to the $465,173 paid to Timothy Boyd by ski operator Peak Resorts.

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John Dempsey, a partner at consulting firm Mercer, says his study of 81 large-company CEOs showed a 9 percent pay increase last year. “It’s a reflection of the fact that the economy was fairly solid, and the stock market went up,� he said.

Dempsey says executives benefited from an economic weak patch in late 2015, when companies set bonus targets for last year. “The great bulk of companies are linking their pay goals to their budgets,� he said. “When they were setting their budgets up, they were a little more pessimistic.�

Critics say the biggest pay packages amount to uncontrolled greed. The that an average large-company CEO earns 347 times as much as the average U.S. worker, a number that union leader Richard Trumka cites as evidence that “the system is rigged.�

Scholars who study executive pay take a more nuanced view. Very large pay packages can be justified, they say, by the value a successful executive team creates. Centene has paid Neidorff $85 million over the past five years, but its market value has increased by $10 billion.

A careful analysis of compensation plans, though, finds several flaws. Among them:

• The Lake Wobegon effect. As in the fictional town where all children are above average, most boards want their pay to be at least at the median for similar companies. Every time a company boosts its pay to catch up to the median, the median rises.
• A short time horizon. Many companies have adopted performance plans that hand executives stock or cash for meeting long-term goals — but the long term lasts just three years. , at four years, is the only St. Louis company with a longer performance period.
• Counterproductive targets. If a company sets a hard-and-fast target for, say, earnings per share, that executives pull out all the stops to hit it. Some of their actions, such as cutting research budgets, may harm the company, but they don’t want to risk not getting a bonus.
• That said, most experts think the system has improved. A decade ago, most long-term compensation came in the form of stock options or time-based restricted stock. Options could compensate an executive handsomely just because the stock market was rising, and time-based stock rewards the boss for merely sticking around.

According to consulting firm Pay Governance, 86 percent of large companies now have performance-based long-term pay plans, up from 50 percent in 2009.

With these plans, the executives lose money if they don’t meet goals. Aegion, for example, has been in a multiyear slump, and its 2014-2016 incentive plan paid out at just 46 percent of its original value.

Overall, those long-term plans account for two-thirds of total pay. Radhakrishnan Gopalan, associate professor of finance at Washington University’s Olin School of Business, says that’s a big step forward from the days when insider-dominated boards often handed out discretionary bonuses based on little more than a desire to keep the big boss happy.

“Over time, I definitely would say the executive labor market has become more competitive,� Gopalan says.