estimates of the returns to quality and coauthorship in economic academia salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single authored articles estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual s return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1 n times that of a single authored paper

formulating research policy on expert advice abstract national research assessments represent the principal policy used by countries with public university systems to improve the quality of their universities research they typically employ expert panels of local academics to assess journal quality and use such assessments to reward publications we propose a model of how experts assess quality and test this model using data from the recent australian assessment controlling for objective quality we show that experts cognitive biases dominate their assessments consequently such assessments exaggerate the quality of the experts research and understate that of their colleagues our model can explain 95 of the variation in assessments

aging and productivity among economists economists productivity over their careers and as measured by publication in leading journals declines very sharply with age there is no difference by age in the probability that an article submitted to a leading journal will be accepted rates of declining productivity are no greater among the very top publishers than among others and the probability of acceptance is increasingly related to the author s quality rather than the author s age

patterns of research output and author concentration in the economics literature this study finds that a strong bibliometric regularity exists in the publication pattern in the economics literature the number of authors publishing n papers is approximately 1 n superscript c of those publishing one paper the economics literature conforms very well to the model with c 1 84 if data are taken from a large collection of journals when applied to individual journals the result shows that values of c range from 2 04 to 3 11 this paper also reports the degree of author concentration among leading economics journals finally this study finds that the graduates of three graduate programs account for more than half of the top 100 authors indicates strong institutional dominance in the production of the most prolific authors copyright 1991 by mit press

determinants of scholarly productivity among male and female economists i introduction the purpose of this article is to test a model of the determinants of articles produced by male and female academics of particular interest is how article production is influenced by coauthorship institutional research orientation and gender several works have identified and demonstrated the trend toward coauthorship in economics and in other disciplines using data from the journal of economic literature heck and zaleski 1991 demonstrated that the incidence of coauthorship has increased from about 15 of total articles in 1969 to about 35 in 1989 durden and perri 1995 report that as of 1992 the proportion coauthored had grown to more than 38 hudson 1996 finds that by 1993 coauthorship rates in the journal of political economy and american economic review were 39 6 and 54 9 respectively as compared to rates of 6 and 8 in 1950 why do economists coauthor rational interest theory suggests that if scholars collaborate then there must be a utility enhancing result other things equal this could be in the form of higher salaries and increased probabilities of promotion greater access to funded research greater mobility in job markets and the like which might result if collaboration significantly increases the overall production of published papers studies by mcdowell and melvin 1983 barnett et al 1988 and piette and ross 1992 suggest that coauthorship among scholars may increase article production through the division of labor made necessary by increased complexity in the subject matter and by the need to saturate markets to increase the probability of getting papers accepted for publication laband and tollison 2000 find evidence that increasing rates of coauthorship result from the greater quantitative content of articles greater requirement for the use of sophisticated econometric techniques and the fact that cooperation is cheaper in time and other resources as compared to learning what is necessary to publish in another field or discipline hamermesh and oster 2002 discuss nonpecuniary purely consumption benefits such as the pleasure obtained from cooperation and suggest that higher levels of prestige among colleagues may also be relevant although many reasons for cooperation have been developed not much has been done to determine whether the rate of coauthorship among scholars actually affects total article production using cross section data hansen et al 1978 and graves et al 1982 estimate productivity models but coauthorship is not included in either study mcdowell and smith 1992 include a coauthorship variable but find that it neither increases nor decreases article production when articles are discounted by the number of authors hollis 2001 uses panel data to examine the relationship between coauthorship and research productivity he finds that coauthorship leads to better longer and more frequent publications when publications are discounted by the number of authors however coauthorship appears negatively related to research output mcdowell and smith s 1992 and hollis s 2001 results are very counterintuitive because a viable reason for coauthorship is to increase efficiency as shown in durden and perri 1995 durden and perri 1995 estimate a time series model finding that coauthorship is highly instrumental in determining article productivity as far as we know the only study by economists that specifically analyzes the effect of institutional research orientation on publishing output is that by graves et al 1982 using data from 240 schools they estimate total pages published per faculty member in the top 24 economics journals between 1974 78 using a series of independent variables to proxy influences that affect publication they find that secretaries per faculty member helps and teaching load hinders production the effects of ph d status teaching assistance and faculty student ratios are mixed depending on specification of the model

contributions to economics journals by the canadian economics profession 1981 90 this paper provides measures of average publication rates and frequency distributions of articles and pages in all journals indexed by the index of economics articles over the 1980s the study covers 733 economists holding tenured or probationary appointments at canadian universities in the 1989 90 academic year all article and page counts are converted to single author equivalent sae measures by dividing by the number of authors over the decade economists published on average one sae article every 2 5 years the paper also generates measures of publications rates in quality journals of the profession as well as rankings of university departments

sorting and agglomeration economies in french economics departments abstract are agglomeration and peer effects at stake in academic research to tackle this question we study how departments characteristics affect the quantity and quality of academics publications in economics in france controlling for individual time varying characteristics and individual fixed effects department characteristics have an explanatory power at least equal to a quarter of that of individual characteristics and possibly as high as theirs the quantity and quality of an academic s publications in a field increase with the presence of other academics specialised in that field and with the share of the department s publications output in that field in contrast department size proximity to other large departments homogeneity in terms of publication performance presence of colleagues with connections abroad and composition in terms of positions and age matter for some publication measures but only if not controlling for individual fixed effects

the review process in economics is it too fast rewards for publications in good economics journals are very high and submission fees and other monetary costs associated with submitting an existing manuscript are low consequently the editorial delay especially the first response time the time until the first editorial decision by postponing monetary rewards to publication constitutes the major submission cost from the author s perspective reducing the delay will induce many additional submissions of low quality papers to good journals increasing significantly the workload of editors and referees moreover the rejection rate will increase and cause papers to be rejected more times before publication offsetting at least some of the shorter first response times as a result the efforts of many editors to reduce the editorial delay although attracting more submissions to their journals may have adverse effects from a social perspective and the optimal delay might be longer than the current average of four months

economists salaries and lifetime productivity one of the advantages of studying academic labor markets is that many facets of productivity are easily measured this makes it possible to study the relationship between pay and productivity there has been some debate whether labor markets are auction markets where salaries equal expected near term productivity or are characterized by implicit long term contracts in this paper we test these propositions directly and perhaps for the first time using data from the academic labor market we show that economists salaries are best described as reflecting implicit long term contracts weiss and lillard 14 modelled the determination of academic salaries when a professor s productivity changes over time perhaps due to luck in creativity or shifts in opportunities for productive research they concluded that if there are no costs to mobility then the salary must equal the professor s immediate expected productivity competition among universities for faculty forces salaries to equal expected productivity in the near term with positive costs of mobility this spot market relationship is severed causing salaries to be less sensitive to new information about expected productivity in particular the cost of mobility creates a wedge that allows increases decreases in expected near term productivity to not always be matched by wage increases decreases in fact if mobility is sufficiently costly the contract provides perfect insurance against individual failure and a stable salary stream over time 14 162 since salary does vary over an academic s career the stable salary stream scenario is empirically irrelevant the question then is whether professors are paid according to their expected near term productivity or according to some implicit long term contract that might place a greater weight on early productivity what factors determine a faculty member s productivity in a university let us assume that universities are concerned with their contribution to the advancement of knowledge or their reputation for doing so and teaching a university s current reputation for advancing knowledge depends on its current publications and citations 1 a university is not directly interested in re

not by productivity alone how visibility and specialization contribute to academic earnings the popular adage publish or perish has long defined individual career strategies as well as scholarly investigations of earnings inequality in academe as researchers have relied heavily on rese

fishes ponds and productivity student advisor matching and early career publishing success for economics phds i introduction research productivity is an important concern for members of the academe publishing success is important for individual departments because more productive faculty increases the department s research profile which in turn increases the department s professional reputation as evidence thursby 2000 and ehrenberg and hurst 1998 find that a department s reputation in the national research council nrc ratings increases with published research while smyth 1999 finds that pages published in the top 5 journals have a greater impact than pages published in other journals publishing success is important for individual faculty members because peer reviewed publications have long been shown to be economic currency for academic economists bratsberg ragan and warren 2003 moore newman and turnbull 1998 sauer 1988 among others research promise is important for graduate students because students with the greatest promise for productive careers are likely to receive the best initial job placements buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 krueger and wu 2000 long 1978 indeed according to a survey of hiring departments carson and navarro 1988 every single top 20 domestic economics program considered the quality of one s research agenda to be of moderate to great importance in the hiring decision an important question then is how to identify which factors are associated with the likelihood of having a more productive research career to date empirical studies have focused on the program from which the student graduated recent examples include collins cox and stango 2000 davis huston and patterson 2001 stock and alston 2000 this focus implicitly assumes that because only the very best students become enrolled in elite programs graduates of highly ranked programs should hold the greatest promise for publishing success 1 in support coupe 2001 and buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 find that students graduating from top programs are more likely to publish in core economics journals while hogan 1981 finds that students graduating from programs with more active faculty publish more journal articles before placing total faith in these results however members of the academe should ask whether such findings hold across all points in the graduate distribution or whether they are only accurate predictors on average previously published data clearly suggest the latter for instance buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 find that 30 of tier 1 graduates do not publish any academic articles within the first 9 yr after phd receipt while 50 do not publish any top 50 articles as defined by liebowitz and palmer 1984 in other words there is a large amount of unexplained variability in the future success of a program s graduates krueger and wu 2000 93 consequently it is likely that significant overlap exists between the performance of top program graduates and lesser program graduates with significant portions of the latter outperforming significant portions of the former with this in mind the question becomes is there a readily observable factor that is a less noisy predictor of a student s likelihood for publishing success we argue that there is during a student s postgraduate education one of the most significant influences is his or her dissertation advisor we posit that for timing reasons advisors will possess additional insight into a student s true research potential that was not available to the admission committee when deciding whether to admit the student into the program consequently we expect a student s dissertation advisor to be a more informed predictor of his or her early career productivity than the program from which he or she receives the phd 2 in other words we believe that considering the identity of a student s dissertation advisor in addition to the quality of the program from which the student receives the phd should help reduce the uncertainty inherent in predicting the student s position within the early career productivity distribution

collaboration incentives endogenous selection into single and coauthorships by surname initial in economics and management many prior studies suggest that default alphabetical ordering of coauthors in economicsconfers disproportionate professional advantages on those with an early surname initialbecause of the greater prominence it gives to the first author however these studies do notconsider that authors select into coauthorships according to the incentives identified wedevelop a model of endogenous selection into single and coauthorships around the principlethat no one wants to be second author when they expect to provide the larger contribution i e are of higher quality we test it with authorship data from economics with man agement which does not use default alphabetical ordering as a benchmark we predict foreconomics that lower quality authors with an early surname initial would be less desirablecoauthors whereas higher quality authors with a late initial would have a lower desire tocoauthor most desired are early initial authors of high quality who are therefore advan taged in forming high quality collaborations the combined effect predicts citation rankincreases with surname initial for single authored papers and decreases for coauthored we find both effects for economics when compared to management and absolutely ourfindings indicate that part of the advantage enjoyed by early surname initial authors in eco nomics could be due to the higher ability among them having more incentive compatiblecollaborators rather than merely to greater prominence

the effect of gender sorting on propensity to coauthor implications for academic promotion a cohort sample of ph d economists indicates a significant propensity for researchers to select coauthors of the same sex this gender sorting contributes to lower article production for women further we find evidence of bias in academic promotion when single authored and coauthored articles carry the same weight in promotion and salary decisions the evidence explains in part why women academics wait longer for promotion and are not as likely to be promoted as men among the effects of gender sorting is self selection of women into larger departments where they are more likely to find colleagues of the same sex

how do journal quality co authorship and author order affect agricultural economists salaries utilizing an original data set containing annual salaries and peer reviewed publication histories for 326 faculty members from top ranked ph d granting programs we examine the labor market for academic agricultural economists the results suggest that higher quality publications have a greater impact on annual earnings that sole authored articles have a higher return than multi authored articles and that no wage premium exists for being the lead author of a non alphabetic article

the slowdown in first response times of economics journals can it be beneficial the first response time henceforth frt of economics journals has increased over the last four decades from 1 2 months to 3 6 months the optimal frt however is not zero because the frt deters submission of mediocre papers to good journals and consequently saves valuable time of referees and editors the change in the actual frt is in the same direction as the change in the optimal frt which has increased because of the availability of research on the internet prior to publication and because the costs of refereeing a paper have increased

scholarships citations and salaries economic rewards in economics while substantial attention has been paid to the determinants of academics earnings 5 7 8 14 15 this literature has by implication suggested that the mere fact of having spent more time in the profession and the publication of more scholarly articles and books are the major determinants of salary differences our purpose here is to introduce a new determinant the quality of one s scholarly research measured by the frequency of references to that work as an additional objective measure of productivity we expect that this proxy for the extent of a scholar s influence on the work of other researchers is rewarded by the market in addition to giving a more complete picture of the determination of salaries in academic labor markets our approach should be useful in establishing a better framework for the evaluation of issues of discrimination in such markets than has been presented before 2 9

reputational capital and academic pay geoffrey k turnbull i introduction economists continue to have a strong interest in academic labor markets as the steady stream of earnings studies over the past several decades readily attests the academic labor market draws the attention of economists not only because it is a topic of direct personal interest but also because it presents an opportunity to examine general theories of labor markets in a context with which the researcher has intimate experience nonetheless important questions about how the market values research teaching and service remain unanswered to what extent does the market reward quality versus quantity of published research or team production in the form of co authorship furthermore how durable is reputational capital for individuals whose research productivity diminishes during their career ultimately these questions relate in one way or another to the nature of the incentive structure faced by academic economists we provide new evidence concerning the role of research quality co authorship administrative service and teaching performance in the production of reputational capital in addition we explore the question of the durability of reputational capital once some of these activities cease we assume that the quantity and quality of published research largely determines an individual s reputational capital in the external market to help us sort out the separate effects on reputational capital of both the quality and quantity of research activity we measure research quality by both journal quality and career citations employing an interactive quantity quality term a related question concerns the role of team production in building an individual s reputational capital do individuals receive differential returns to publishing single authored versus co authored research papers this is an interesting question in light of the substantial increase in co authorship over the last few decades 1 one explanation of this trend is that the academic market has presented scholars with increasing opportunities for specialization in the production of knowledge and that team production involves the combination of complementary skilled researchers if team production reflects complementarities in the production of research we should observe little difference in the returns to single versus co authored work another explanation is that co authorship involves the combination of substitute skilled researchers so that co authorship presents a way for individuals to reduce their research efforts without reducing their individual measured research output to the extent that co authorshi p represents such substitution the market should fully discount the returns to multiple authored papers in this article we also move beyond identifying the factors that enhance an individual s reputation in the market to study the question of the durability of reputational capital some individuals quit publishing once they are tenured or promoted while others experience lengthy but temporary breaks in their flow of research output we examine the potential penalties associated with gaps in research output providing the first empirical evidence concerning the durability of reputational capital for academic economists in order to ensure that our analysis deals with these issues in a way that is most relevant to a large portion of the market for academic economists we use data from several research universities but restrict the sample frame to a single discipline economics much of the previous work estimating how publications or other factors affect academic salaries typically use data from a single university with earnings equations estimated across disciplines restricting the sample to a single discipline has the additional advantage of reducing potential heterogeneity problems associated with measuring productivity across disciplines in addition our data enable us more thoroughly to explore the empirical issues in the debate since they permit more precise measures of the past and current productivity of individuals engaged in comparable work

journals preferences and publishing in agricultural and environmental economics research quality is an increasingly important metric for determining funding allocations promotion and tenure and professional prestige a key metric often used as a proxy for research quality is the ranking of the journal in which a manuscript appears while citation based measures of journal quality are commonly used less is known about other dimensions of journal quality and prestige we report results from an international study using best worst scaling to investigate researchers journal preferences respondents used two criteria to assess journals the impact a paper in the journal would have on career progression and the impact beyond academia of papers in the journal among the sample of journals studied the american journal of agricultural economics is ranked at the top for career progression for the aggregate sample while science was rated at the top for broader impact we find no significant correlation between the journal scores based on the two criteria nor between them and the journals impact factors these results suggest that impact beyond academia is poorly aligned with career incentives and that citation measures reflect poorly if at all peers esteem of journals heteroscedastic scale adjusted latent class models reveal marked heterogeneity in journal preferences related to researchers institutional affiliation and geographic region we find significant differences in error variance over people and choices people were less consistent when choosing their least as opposed to their most preferred journal this finding has broader implications given the burgeoning use of best worst surveys

the slowdown of the economics publishing process over the last three decades there has been a dramatic slowdown of the publication process at top economics journals a substantial part is due to journals requiring more extensive revisions various explanations are considered democratization of the review process increases in the complexity of papers growth of the profession and cost and benefit arguments changes in the profession are examined using time series data connections between these changes and the slowdown are examined using paper level data there is evidence for some explanations but most of the slowdown remains unexplained changes may reflect evolving social norms

earnings profiles of department heads comparing cross section and panel models academics who become department heads suffer declining research skills because of time spent performing administrative tasks and this skill depreciation slows future wage growth this study examines kansas state university faculty who served as department heads during the period 1965 92 cross section estimates of the compensation for serving as department head are biased upward because of a correlation between unmeasured productivity characteristics and selection as department head to correct for this bias the authors reestimate earnings equations using a panel model that incorporates personal fixed effects although the average department head in the sample received a wage premium of 12 the premium for past administrative service had completely disappeared for the typical former head another finding is that skill depreciation was most severe and wage growth most adversely affected in the sciences as compensation department heads in the sciences received a larger initial administrative premium th

growth inequality and social welfare cross country evidence social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels can be used to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare in a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years most of the cross country and over time variation in changes in social welfare is due to changes in average incomes in contrast the changes in inequality observed during this period are on average much smaller than changes in average incomes are uncorrelated with changes in average incomes and have contributed relatively little to changes in social welfare

fame and the fortune of academic economists how the market rewards influential research in economics we analyze the pay and position of 1 009 faculty members who teach in doctoral granting economics departments at fifty three large public universities in the united states using the web of science we have identified the journal articles published by these scholars and the number of times each of these articles has been subsequently cited in published research articles we find that research influence as measured by various measures of total citations is a surprisingly strong predictor of the salary and the prestige of the department in which professors are employed we also examine how coauthorship is rewarded by the market

george bush versus al gore irreversibilities in greenhouse gas accumulation and emission control investment abstract this paper investigates the fundamental problem of mitigating the impacts of climate change in an environment of uncertainty and learning in particular the paper uses a stochastic version of nordhaus s dice model to show that the irreversibility of investment capital has a stronger effect than irreversibilities in climate change other than catastrophic effects the implications are that if abatement decisions are irreversible there should be less emission control today than would be optimal without taking learning into account and that policy makers should pursue control policies that are costlessly reversible a variant on the no regrets strategy

tools or toys the impact of high technology on scholarly productivity i introduction and motivation in the past several decades investment that makes communication easier has increased rapidly in the united states and other developed economies since the mid 1980s a combination of technical change and deregulation has also reduced long distance telephone rates in the united states by 50 reported by allen 1995 pitney bowes 1997 reported that fax usage increased by 20 between 1996 and 1997 alone and electronic mail e mail unknown before 1985 is ubiquitous today popular discussion of a wide range of additional examples of rapidly declining prices and explosive growth of the use of telecommunications is provided by cairncross 1997 attempts to measure the impact on aggregate total factor and labor productivity of these supposedly productivity enhancing investments in broad reaching technical improvements such as computing machinery and communications equipment have not met with great success as in morrison 1997 but see greenan and mairesse 1996 1 an alternative to measuring effects on the broader economy is to measure the impact of generalized technical change on productivity in specific activities observed at the micro level an earlier literature including griliches 1958 and trajtenberg 1989 has clearly traced the effect of specific innovations in raising productivity in specific sectors of the economy this article expands on that tradition by trying to identify the effect of the recent broad revolution in communications on one activity scholarly publishing we propose studying scholarly publishing before and after technical change greatly lowered communication costs we examine in particular whether increasing ease of communication has altered scholars choices about their methods of production and whether those methods yielded changes in the productivity of scholarly activity that are consistent with increasing access to new communications technologies 2 in section ii we discuss a model of the production process in scholarly writing in relation to the cost of communications in section iii we describe the unique data set we assembled to examine the relation between technical change and scholarly productivity section iv presents the results of using these data to test the hypotheses that we develop and section v compares coauthored to solo authored studies and provides a suggestion for the increased prevalence of the former section vi offers a consistent explanation for most of the results ii a model of scholarly production the example that we use in this study of the impact of technology is the nature and outcomes of the choices of co workers by authors of scholarly publications in economics the importance of team research has been stressed by a number of authors studying the economics of innovation including dasgupta 1988 who also presents a research summary so that our specific example has broader implications for the study of technical change has the decline in the cost of communication altered scholars choices in a way consistent with these technologies increasing scholarly productivity in examining scholarly productivity we focus on research output in particular we view scholars as having three production choices 1 work solo s 2 work with close by coauthor s c or 3 work with distant coauthor s d in the model in this section the scholar is assumed to choose a production technology that maximizes his or her scholarly productivity measured as the quality of the article produced in section vi we a dopt an alternative characterization of a scholar s choices we assume that the scholar has a wide range of potential research activities to choose among and has perfect knowledge of the productivity p valued in dollars of all potential matches s c sub i member of c and d sub i member of d 3 each match generates one solo equivalent article per period

citations or journal quality which is rewarded more in the academic labor market research quality can be evaluated from citations or from the prestige of journals publishing the research we relate salary of tenured university of california uc economists to their lifetime publications of 5 500 articles and to the 140 000 citations to these articles citations hardly affect salary especially in top ranked uc departments where impacts of citations are less than one tenth those of journals in lower ranked departments and when journal quality is less comprehensively measured effects of citations on salary increase if journal quality is just measured by counting articles in journal tiers apparent effects of citations are overstated jel a14 j44

willful blindness the inefficient reward structure in academic research this article examines how economics departments judge research articles and assign credit to authors it begins with a demonstration that only strictly prorated author credit induces researchers to choose e cient sized teams nevertheless survey evidence reveals that most economics departments only partially prorate authorship credit implying excessive coauthorship indeed a half century increase in coauthorship may be better explained by incomplete proration than by any increased specialization among authors a possible explanation for the reliance on incomplete proration is the self interest of economists who are more likely to engage coauthorship full professors the self interest of senior faculty may also explain the relatively small role given to citations in senior promotions a rational response by economists to the under proration of author credit is to engage in false authorship although false authorship is of dubious ethical status it may have the perverse impact of improving the e ciency of team production grossly excessive coauthorship where little attention is paid to most authors listed on a paper as found in some other academic disciplines may be the path down which economics is headed if the reward structure is not altered jel a14 o30 i23

productivity of highly skilled immigrants economists in the postwar period larry d singell jr prior work finds declining immigrant quality in the postwar period that is linked to source country and skill composition changes associated with the 1965 immigration act this paper uses a unique panel of foreign and native born american economic association members to show that the highly skilled experienced a similar shift away from european migrants toward those from asia however the findings do not indicate that this change in source country composition has been accompanied by a decline in quality rather the most recent cohorts of foreign born economists appear to be more productive than their native counterparts jel j61 i introduction this article is the first systematic analysis of the attributes and abilities of foreign born u s economists since a descriptive study of the brain drain by grubel and scott 1967 it also provides some of the first formal evidence for the largely theoretical proposition in earlier work by bhagwati and rodriquez 1975 that the united states draws the best skilled workers from abroad however recent immigration literature has not focused on the brain drain but has generated considerable debate concerning whether the 1965 immigration and nationality act has reduced the skill quality of u s immigrants in particular descriptive evidence in borjas 1987 and greenwood 1983 respectively indicates that the 1965 law shifted the composition of u s immigrants toward non european nations and increased the number of low skilled migrants to the united states our article extends this work by examining whether there has been a post 1965 change in the source country mix of ph d economists and whether such chan ges impact the productivity of the foreign born in comparison to their native counterparts most empirical studies of immigrant productivity have focused on earnings early cross sectional studies of immigrant earnings including chiswick 1978a concluded that the age earnings profile of immigrants is steeper than that of comparable native born workers and though initially lower crosses the native profile 10 to 15 years after immigration these results are consistent with the widely held belief that the immigration process self selects the highly motivated and industrious from their respective source countries thus immigrants although they initially enter the united states with relatively low levels of human capital eventually become more productive than their native counterparts more recent work by borjas 1985 1987 has contested these conclusions arguing that it is not possible to separately identify assimilation and cohort effects using a single cross sectional data set in particular the positive correlation between earnings and years since migration in cross sectional data may be due to immigrant assimilation or a cohort effect that arises from the declining skill quality of more recent immigrant groups borjas combines multiple cross sectional data sets to separately identify assimilation and cohort effects and finds evidence indicating that earlier cohorts of immigrants do relatively better than both natives and more recent immigrant cohorts suggesting a decline in immigrant quality although chiswick 1986 challenges the contention of declining immigrant quality and funkhouser and trejo 1995 find evidence that immigrant quality may have increased during the 1980s borjas 1995 contends that the empirical evidence consistently shows that immigrant quality has declined for most of the postwar period however the decline in immigrant quality has not necessarily been found within specific groups of immigrants in particular greenwood and mcdowell 1986 find that the change in skill quality is related to the shift in the source country composition of immigrants away from european nations toward those from asia and latin american after the 1965 immigration act thus explanations for the relatively poor performance of recent immigrants including those in lalonde and topel 1991 1992 and borjas 1992 focus on the post 1965 changes in the incentives to migrate to the united states that have increased the number of low skilled non european immigrants

on and off the hot seat an analysis of entry into and out of university administration the authors investigate economists decisions to enter and exit department chair positions in research intensive economics departments of elite universities during the postwar era 1948 1989 they use the american economic association survey of members as well as phone surveys to determine which and at what point in their careers faculty assume administrative positions the theoretical model predicts and empirical results confirm that a faster rate of knowledge depreciation in an economist s field of study reduces the entry and exit rates for the chair position moreover among those who have exited the position of chair longer terms of past chair service and faster knowledge depreciation accelerate the timing of movements into upper level administration the findings suggest that administrators are to some extent made and not born and that the growing specialization and technical nature of many professions could affect who chooses administrative careers and at what point in their careers they choose

do academic salaries decline with seniority this article reexamines the negative seniority earnings relationship for academic economists the empirical results show that the anomalous negative seniority effect found in earlier academic market studies holds in the absence of direct measures of research productivity the negative effect however eventually disappears as more comprehensive measures of publishing citations and other productivity measures are included in the wage equation to control for the quantity and quality of faculty productivity faculty with greater seniority appear to be rewarded relatively less simply because many have been relatively less productive than their colleagues with less seniority at similar stages in their careers