A Bayesian look at American academic wages: From wage dispersion to wage compression

Majda Benzidia () and Michel Lubrano
Additional contact information
Majda Benzidia: Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS, Centrale Marseille, AMSE

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2020, vol. 18, issue 2, No 4, 213-238

Abstract: Abstract OECD countries have experienced a large increase in top wage inequality. Atkinson (2008) attributes this phenomena to the superstar theory leading to a Pareto tail in the wage distribution with a low Pareto coefficient. Do we observe a similar phenomena for academic wages? We examine wage formation in a public US university using for each academic rank a hybrid mixture formed by a lognormal distribution for regular wages and a Pareto distribution for top wages, using a Bayesian approach. The presence of superstars wages would imply a higher dispersion in the Pareto tail than in the lognormal body. We concluded that academic wages are formed in a different way than other top wages. There is an effort to propose competitive wages to some young Assistant Professors. But when climbing up the wage ladder, we found a phenomenon of wage compression which is just the contrary of a superstar phenomenon.

Keywords: Superstar wages; Academic market; Bayesian inference; Hybrid mixtures; Tournaments theory; Wage formation; Wage compression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10888-019-09431-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: A Bayesian look at American academic wages: From wage dispersion to wage compression (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joecin:v:18:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s10888-019-09431-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10888

DOI: 10.1007/s10888-019-09431-9

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Economic Inequality is currently edited by Stephen Jenkins

More articles in The Journal of Economic Inequality from Springer, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().