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Are Agricultural Experiment Station Faculty Salaries Competitively or Monopsonistically Determined?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2016

Christopher B. Barrett  and
DeeVon Bailey
Christopher B. Barrett
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural, Resource, and Managerial Economics, Cornell University
DeeVon Bailey
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Utah State University
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Abstract

We examine the determinants of agricultural experiment station faculty salaries and find that productivity pays—as manifest by grantsmanship, publications, and the elicitation of competing offers—with no residual evidence of a negative seniority-salary relationship that could signal university monopsony power. This contrasts with findings in the previous literature on faculty salaries. Moreover, national market salary benchmarks, which may proxy for imperfectly observable productivity, correlate almost one-for-one with individual faculty salaries, with individual deviations from peers’ salaries proving essentially random. This evidence is much more consistent with the hypothesis that experiment station faculty salaries are determined in a competitive labor market than with the prevailing wisdom that they are set monopsonistically.

Type
Articles
Information
Agricultural and Resource Economics Review , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , April 1999 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association 

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