professional achievements and gender differences among academic economists i introduction while the academic labor market for economists attracts a good deal of attention among its participants work on the differences in remuneration for economic research and other professional characteristics between men and women in academic institutions has been limited this paper tests for gender differences using data on grants and grant applications from the national science foundation ault rutman and stevenson 1979 addressing issues of academic placement found that the highest rated institution at which an academic economist will be employed is the institution of first employment willis and pieper 1991 found that women who received doctorates in economics in the 1970s had a somewhat higher rate of placement at doctoral degree granting institutions than men but that there was no difference in the rank of the institutions for these placements lower tier institutions must offer promotions to attract candidates moore et al 1983 reported that the rank of the department at which one earned the doctorate is critically important in determining initial academic placement hamermesh johnson and weisbrod 1982 found that for those at prestigious departments increases in citations lead to salary increases but that the department s rank was not inversely related to salary in his review of work by sociologists youn 1988 reported that the prestige of an academic institution was positively related to the research productivity of its scientists there are two competing hypotheses that might explain this result better departments select better scientists achievement model or better departments foster greater productivity ascription model empirical efforts to distinguish between these hypotheses have been mixed the research on salary differentials in academia has generally found that there are significant gender differences that widen during the careers of men and women 1 barbezat 1991 the most recent evidence suggests that salary differentials in the academic community may have diminished somewhat since the 1960s but still remain weiler 1990 separated the influence of the department s rank on salary by treating it in a separate equation and found that standard formulations underestimate the degree of salary discrimination although important salary is not the only measure of achievement in academe promotion to a higher rank employment in key departments and the production of well placed articles all help determine an economist s influence in the profession but despite the dramatic increase in the percentage of women receiving the ph d during the past two decades the number of senior women at graduate institutions is still very low 2 to what extent does gender bias exist in economics departments as measured not only by salary but also by other achievements such as the likelihood of achieving a senior position or being employed by a top department is there a difference in the experiences of the younger cohorts compared to their more senior counterparts this paper attempts to answer these important questions by 1 taking into account the endogeneity of the variables that are usually treated as exogenous in models of salary determination and thereby broadening the characteristics that traditionally reflect discrimination and 2 using a new detailed data base developed from the national science foundation the results of this more complete model in which salary as well as other measures of professional achievement are explained show significant differences between men and women at the more senior level at the assistant professor level although the signs of the gender coefficients are consistent with a discrimination hypothesis the results are not statistically significant ii the model single equations using the techniques developed by oaxaca 1973 and blinder 1973 have long been used to estimate gender salary differentials in academia with productivity measures such as books and articles published administrative experience etc

can mentoring help female assistant professors interim results from a randomized trial while much has been written about the potential benefits of mentoring in academia very little research documents its effectiveness we present data from a randomized controlled trial of a mentoring program for female economists organized by the committee for the status of women in the economics profession and sponsored by the national science foundation and the american economics association to our knowledge this is the first randomized trial of a mentoring program in academia we evaluate the performance of three cohorts of participants and randomly assigned controls from 2004 2006 and 2008 this paper presents an interim assessment of the program s effects our results suggest that mentoring works after five years the 2004 treatment group averaged 4 more nsf or nih grants and 3 additional publications and were 25 percentage points more likely to have a top tier publication there are significant but smaller effects at three years post treatment for the 2004 and 2006 cohorts combined while it is too early to assess the ultimate effects of mentoring on the academic careers of program participants the results suggest that this type of mentoring may be one way to help women advance in the economics profession and by extension in other male dominated academic fields this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

the family gap for young women in the united states and britain can maternity leave make a difference in the united states and britain there is a family gap between the wages of mothers and other women differential returns to marital and parental status explain 40 50 of the gender gap another 30 40 is explained by women s lower levels of work experience and lower returns to experience taking advantage of quasi experiments in job protected maternity leave in the united states and britain this article finds that women who had leave coverage and returned to work after childbirth received a wage premium that offset the negative wage effects of children

academic wage structure by gender the roles of peer review performance and market forces we focus on understanding the role of productivity in determining wage structure differences between men and women in academia the data arise from a pay equity study carried out in a single midwestern u s university over the 1996 1997 academic year econometric results confirm that external market forces exert influence over both male and female salary but peer review ratings play a significant role in male but not female earnings determination with similar results for objective measures of research teaching and service

the impact of student debt on education career and marriage choices of female lawyers abstract we develop and estimate a dynamic model to study the impact of student debt on education career and marriage market choices of young female lawyers our model accounts for several important institutional features of the labor market for lawyers including differences in the work hours across occupational tracks and learning about the prospects of promotion to partner some female students need to take on large amounts of student debt to finance their education and hence start their careers with large amounts of negative wealth the empirical findings suggest that student debt has negative effects on marriage prospects career prospects and investments in educational quality of female lawyers the analysis also provides new insights into the design of public policies that aim to increase public sector employment we show that it is possible to design conditional wage or debt service subsidy programs that significantly increase public sector career choices at reasonable costs

women in economics moving up or falling off the academic career ladder copyright 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 by the american economic association

recognition for group work gender differences in academia abstract how is credit for group work allocated when individual contributions are not observed i use data on academics publication records to test whether demographic traits like gender influence how credit is allocated under such uncertainty while solo authored papers send a clear signal about ability coauthored papers are noisy providing no specific information about each contributor s skills i find that men are tenured at roughly the same rate regardless of coauthoring choices women however are less likely to receive tenure the more they coauthor the result is much less pronounced among women who coauthor with other women

gender and promotion in the economics profession the authors use unique panel data on american economic association members to test for gender differences in promotion in a profession with a well defined promotion and job hierarchy and in which men and women exhibit similar labor market attachment the results suggest that over the period from the 1960s through the early 1980s female economists had lower levels of professional attainment and career advancement than did their male colleagues with similar attributes these gender differences remain in evidence despite controls for unobserved heterogeneity and self selection between academic and non academic jobs there is evidence however that promotion prospects for female economists significantly improved during the 1980s not only at all ranks but also within both ph d granting institutions and non ph d granting institutions in fact the results reveal no unexplained gender specific differences in promotion by the end of the 1980s

does raiding explain the negative returns to faculty seniority i introduction economists have studied various aspects of faculty mobility research shows that turnover is greater among nonunion faculty rees 1994 female faculty average slightly more employers than male faculty barbezat and hughes 2001 ginther and kahn 2004 1 the responsiveness of turnover to relative pay diminishes with rank ehrenberg kasper and rees 1991 and research productivity enhances prospects for upward mobility ault rutman and stevenson 1979 1982 coupe smeets and warzynski 2005 still questions remain unanswered where do faculty go when they leave a university how does faculty turnover vary with time at a university what percentage of faculty move upward and what percentage move downward because of tenure denials or the prospect of being turned down for tenure the present article contributes to our understanding of these issues but its primary objective was to use data on faculty mobility to provide insights on another issue returns to academic seniority the negative returns to seniority that many studies find are commonly attributed to one of two factors 2 the first view is that negative returns reflect monopsony power on the part of universities faculty with high mobility costs acquire high seniority and because they are unlikely to move they are paid less than equally productive faculty that employers view as more likely to leave a competing explanation is that highly productive faculty are raided according to this story returns to seniority are biased negatively because faculty with high seniority tend to have low unmeasured productivity the best faculty are bid away moving on to better jobs those who remain are the faculty without outside offers and the negative returns estimated for senior faculty actually reflect a penalty for low unmeasured productivity rather than a true penalty for seniority the raiding story has several implications first estimated returns to seniority should become less negative the more fully the productivity is measured second estimated returns should be less negative once we control for faculty who are bid away finally and of particular importance estimated returns to seniority should not be negative for faculty who are bid away the faculty for whom unmeasured productivity is presumably high with the right data set these hypotheses can be tested rejection of the raiding hypothesis would provide tacit evidence of monoposony in academic markets 3 this article contributes to the literature in several ways it is the first research to directly test the raiding hypothesis it provides a detailed look at faculty mobility in one segment of the academic labor market it extends and improves bratsberg ragan and warren 2003 in the following ways it expands the sample to cover three decades of faculty pay records it includes additional controls for productivity number and types of books recent and prospective articles and so forth resulting in the most complete specification of research productivity to date and it allows for heterogeneity in the seniority penalty via phd pedigree and direction of move finally it tests for the possibility that the academic job market does a better job of matching faculty and universities in recent years as might be expected because of the information revolution the sample consists of five public phd granting universities in the midwest we track all tenure track economics faculty employed in these universities over a 30 yr period we measure their productivity their pay and their mobility as such the study provides a rich and detailed investigation of one subset of economics programs it is possible that mobility may be greater in urban areas where faculty can more readily obtain alternative employment without relocating and prior research indicates that pay structures depend on the university s stature and its relative emphasis on research and teaching

the relative impacts of economics journals 1970 1990 our data collection and database assembly efforts were assisted by john p sophocleus mark gwartney michele butler and scott ralston we received extremely valuable computer programming assistance from jon brunson and edward novak constructive comments were receivedfrom two anonymous reviewers financial supportfrom the faculty development committee at salisbury state university is gratefully acknowledged

are there gender differences in the job mobility patterns of academic economists labor economic theory posits that job mobil ity should affect worker salaries the degree to which this holds for academic faculty has received considerable attention prior empirical studies have estimated log wage regressions that control for both years of total work experience and years of seniority at the current institution in an effort to determine whether negative returns to seniority exist in academic labor markets for example bernt bratsberg james ragan and jim warren 2003 and william moore robert turnbull and geoffrey newman 1998 for aca demic economists michael ransom 1993 kevin hallock 1995 and emily hoffman 1976 for specific institutions debra a barbezat and michael r donihue 1998 and barbezat 1989 for

a pooled dynamic analysis of interfuel substitution in industrial energy demand by the g 7 countries a dynamic version of considine s 1990 linear logit model is used to obtain theoretically consistent estimates of long run price elasticities from pooled intercountry data on industrial energy consumption this model also provides a rare direct estimate of the important rate of dynamic adjustment revealing a median lag of ten years the long run demands for oil and coal are the most elastic and the strongest channels for interfuel substitution are between oil and natural gas with no significant evidence of complementarity between fuels

employers discriminatory behavior and the estimation of wage discrimination this paper considers the linkage of empirical estimates of wage discrimination between two groups introduced by oaxaca 1973 to a theoretical model of employers discriminatory behavior it is shown that conditional on different assumptions about employers discriminatory tastes oaxaca s estimators of wage discrimination can be derived that the approach is more generally useful is demonstrated by deriving an alternative estimator of wage discrimination based on the assumption that within each type of labor e g unskilled skilled the utility function capturing employers discriminatory tastes is homogeneous of degree zero with respect to labor inputs from each of the two groups the estimators are compared empirically in an application to male female wage differentials

outside offers and the gender pay gap empirical evidence from the uk academic labour market using a unique data source on academic economist labour market experiences we explore gender pay and promotions in addition to earnings and productivity measures we have information on outside offers and perceptions of discrimination we find both a gender promotions gap and a within rank gender pay gap a driving factor may be outside offers men receive more outside offers than women of comparable characteristics and gain higher pay increases in response this may arise due to discrimination we find that perceptions of discrimination and also outside job applications correlate with an individual receiving earnings below that expected given their characteristics

employee buyout in a bargaining game with asymmetric information why are some firms purchased by their employees this paper explores this question theoretically suggesting that employees may attempt to overcome their informational handicap regarding firm profitability by making simultaneous offers on wages and a purchase price for the firm owners of relatively unprofitable firms will tend to sell out for low prices instead of paying high wages whereas owners of profitable firms will prefer to pay high wages over receiving low firm prices the buyout serves as a screening mechanism the probability of an employee buyout decreases with the employees outside options and increases with owners outside options copyright 1996 by american economic association

gender biases in student evaluations of teaching abstract this article uses data from a french university to analyze gender biases in student evaluations of teaching sets the results of fixed effects and generalized ordered logit regression analyses show that male students express a bias in favor of male professors also the different teaching dimensions that students value in male and female professors tend to match gender stereotypes men are perceived by both male and female students as being more knowledgeable and having stronger class leadership skills which are stereotypically associated with males despite the fact that students appear to learn as much from women as from men

labour market segmentation and workers careers the case of the italian knitwear industry this paper reports on empirical research into the labour market in the knitwear and ready to wear industry in the province of jvjodena emilia in particular it looks at the careers of three categories of workers homeworkers those employed on the production lines of larger firms and artisans 1 italy in common with many other industrialised capitalist countries has witnessed a growing decentralisation of production this tendency has been differently interpreted but a consensus is emerging that such developments are not evidence of economic backward ness 2 on the contrary an industrial structure consisting of firms of different size but with a large number of small and even microscopic enterprises is increasingly being recog nised as one possible avenue of economic development taking this for granted the aim of these notes is to investigate the structure of the labour market in a prosperous area typified by economic growth which has the small firm as its base element

cracks in the glass ceiling gender and promotion in the economics profession gender differences in promotion within the economics profession have long been a concern of the committee on the status of women in the economics profession cswep in a descriptive analysis of the aea universal academic questionnaire rebecca blank 1996 finds that hires and promotions to the associateand fullprofessor levels have averaged 4 2 and 2 7 percentage points below the share of female assistants and associates professors respectively thus women appear to be underrepresented in senior positions suggesting they may face a glass ceiling this paper uses unique panel data for american economic association aea members to examine formally whether there are differences across gender in promotion probabilities an academic labor market beyond its direct interest to economists is well suited to study possible gender differences in promotion because departments can be ranked within the profession and because professors can be ranked within a department by a welldefined promotion hierarchy a focus on academic economists offers an additional advantage in that on the job productivity can be measured directly by research output other promotion studies have had limited controls for productivity and have used cross sectional data which do not permit controls for unobserved ability e g rudolf winter ebmer and josef zweimuller 1997 failure to account for gender differences in unobserved productivity could produce biased inference prior promotion studies also have generally relied on job advancement indexes that limit the distinction between initial job assignment i e an

gender differences in salary and promotion in the humanities in their annual review of academic salaries the american association of university professors observes large gender related salary differentials at doctoral level institutions male professors at the rank of full professor earn 11 4 more than women full professors data on academic labor markets from the survey of doctorate recipients to evaluate gender differences in salaries and promotion probabilities differences in employment outcomes by gender are found using two methods the oaxaca decomposition is used to examine salary differentials and duration analysis is used to estimate promotion to tenure while gender salary differences can largely be explained by academic rank substantial gender differences in promotion to tenure exist after controlling for productivity demographic characteristics and primary work activity

women in the economics profession this article discusses evidence from recent literature on gender literature on gender differences among ph d economists it finds many gender similarities in accomplishments including undergraduate grades publication rates ceteris paribus and labor market commitment it finds no evidence of disadvantages for women in admissions to ph d programs or in nonacademic salaries yet gender differences remain ceteris paribus in gre scores attrition from ph d programs non tenure track academic jobs academic salaries and academic promotion rates the paper suggests that trends toward increasing percentage of females may be peaking particularly given recent drops in female undergraduate economics majors