Studying Ourselves: The Academic Labor Market

Ronald Ehrenberg

No 8965, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper addresses three academic labor market issues; the declining salaries of faculty employed at public colleges and universities relative to their private institution counterparts, the growing dispersion of average faculty salaries across academic institutions within both the public and private sectors, and the impacts of the growing importance and costs of science on the academic labor market and universities. The decline in the salaries of faculty in public institutions relative to their private sector counterparts is attributed primarily to private institutions' tuition levels rising by more in real terms than public institutions' tuition levels. The growing dispersion in average faculty salaries across institutions within each sector is attributed primarily to the growing disperion of endowmentper student levels across private institutions and the growing dispersion of state appropriations per student across public institutions. Finally, controlling for other factors, those universities whose real research expenditures per faculty from institutional funds are growing the most experience the greatest increase in their student/faculty ratio, other variables held constant.

JEL-codes: I2 J5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ltv
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published as Ehrenberg, Ronald G. "Studying Ourselves: The Academic Labor Market," Journal of Labor Economics, 2003, v21(2,Apr), 267-287.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8965.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:8965

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8965

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().