A Bayesian Look at American Academic Wages: The Case of Michigan State University

Majda Benzidia (1) , Michel Lubrano (1)

1 GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille

The paper investigates academic wage formation, taking as a benchmark the Michigan State University. We model wage distributions using a hybrid mixture formed by a lognormal distribution for regular wages and a Pareto distributions for higher wages, using a Bayesian approach. With this model, we test for the presence of superstars in the Pareto member by comparing inequality in the two members. We found some evidence of superstars when recruiting Assistant Professors. However, a dynamic analysis reveals that they have a higher rate of outing, and, if they stay, a lower rate of wage increase. For full professors, we found a phenomenon of wage compression as if there were a kind of higher bound, which is just the contrary of a superstar phenomenon.

Mots clés: wage determination; academic market; superstars; tournaments theory; human capital; Mincer equation; Bayesian inference; hybrid mixtures

Domaines: Economies et finances

Majda Benzidia, Michel Lubrano. A Bayesian Look at American Academic Wages: The Case of Michigan State University. 2016. ⟨halshs-01358882v1⟩