Spending on share-based compensation to employees is always an interesting item for financial analysts, so we recently did a study of how much the S&P 500 have been spending on line item over the last four years. Among the companies that do spend money on equity compensation (23 percent of the S&P 500 do not), the average amount jumped 18 percent, from $126.2 million in 2012 to $148.9 million in 2015. The biggest spenders on share-based pay were, to no surprise, all technology or financial giants.
