Does Raiding Explain the Negative Returns to Faculty Seniority?

Abstract

"We track faculty for 30 yr at five PhD-granting departments of economics. Two-thirds of faculty who take alternative employment move downward; less than one-quarter moves upward. We find a substantial penalty for seniority, even after richly controlling for faculty productivity, and the penalty is little changed when we allow wages and returns to seniority to differ by mobility status. Faculty who end up moving to better or comparable positions were penalized as severely for seniority while they were in our sample as faculty who stay. These results are incompatible with the raiding hypothesis. Faculty from top 10 programs are also punished for seniority but to a lesser degree than other faculty, which could reflect reduced monopsony power against such faculty if they are more marketable. All results persist when we control for prospective publications and allow lower returns for older publications. Match-quality bias has dissipated in the post-internet period, which may be the consequence of greater availability of information. "("JEL" J62, J44, J42) Copyright (c) 2009 Western Economic Association International.

Citations In Economics: Measurement, Uses, and Impacts

“…Some of the studies in table 9, beginning with Sauer (1988), included covariates indicating the number, length, and journal level of each scholar's publications. Even in those cases, as the Moore, Newman, and Turnbull (1998), Baser and Pema (2003), Bratsberg, Ragan, and Warren (2010), Hilmer, Ransom, and Hilmer (2015), and Gibson, Anderson, and Tressler (2017) studies, and the Sen, Voia, and Woolley (2010) data, also suggest, the evidence generally suggests that citations have an independent impact on salaries.…”

Evaluating the Relationship between Pay and Research Productivity: Panel Data Evidence from Ontario Universities

“…The key question is how these findings compare with results from previous studies. Unadjusted for pages and the number of co-authors, estimates from Bratsberg, Ragan, and Warren (2010) suggest that the salary returns for tier 1, tier 2, tier 3, and tier 4 articles are 2.7 percent, 1.9 percent, 1.4 percent, and 0.7 percent, respectively. Results obtained by Moore, Newman, and Terrell (2007) reveal that a top-tier publication is correlated with a 2.5 percent increase in salary among academics in the United States.…”

“…Finally, we note that Bratsberg, Ragan, and Warren (2010) and Stengos (1999, 2003) basically take pages per article and convert them to American Economic Review standardized pages. However, we rely on a simpler approach that focuses on the journal where an article is published and is consistent with Davies et al (2008).…”

Returns to articles versus pages in academic publishing: Do salary-setters show ‘article illusion’?

“…Hilmer et al, 2012). The closest study is of Bratsberg et al (2010) who predict salary by the number of articles and include the number of AER-sized pages (in three tiers for about 50 top journals) in the same regressions. But these authors do not use their model to study possible returns to idea splitting and they only crudely account for journal quality.…”