Search: Tenure

A short history of economics at U. Mass Amherst

by on April 24, 2013 at 6:08 pm in Economics, Education, History | Permalink

From Dylan Matthews.  Here is an excerpt:

The tipping point, Wolff says, was the denial of tenure for Michael Best, a popular, left-leaning junior professor. “He had a lot of student support, and because it was the 1960s students were given to protest,” Wolff recalls. That, and unrelated personality tensions with the administration, inspired the mainstreamers to start leaving.

That created openings, which, in 1973, the administration started to fill in an extremely unorthodox way. They decided to hire a “radical package” of five professors: Wolff (then at the City College of New York), his frequent co-author and City College colleague Stephen Resnick, Harvard professor Samuel Bowles (who’d just been denied tenure at Harvard), Bowles’s Harvard colleague and frequent co-author Herbert Gintis, and Richard Edwards, a collaborator of Bowles and Gintis’s at Harvard and a newly minted PhD. All but Edwards got tenure on the spot.

…Under those five’s guidance, the department came to specialize in both Marxist economics and post-Keynesian economics, the latter of which presents itself as a truer successor to Keynes’s actual writings than mainstream Keynesians like Paul Samuelson. “When I got there, the department basically had three poles,” said Gerald Epstein, who arrived as a professor in 1987. “There was the postmodern Marxian group, which was Steve Resnick and Richard Wolff, and then there was a general radical economics group of Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, and then a Keynesian/Marxian group. Jim Crotty was the leader of that group.” Suffice it to say, most mainstream departments have zero Marxists, period, let alone Keynesian/Marxist hybrids or postmodern Marxists.

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Sylvia Nasar is suing Columbia

by on March 20, 2013 at 7:57 am in Current Affairs, Law | Permalink

A tenured professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and co-director of that school’s business program filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing the university of misdirecting $4.5 million in funds over the last decade.

The professor, Sylvia Nasar, who is the John S. and James L. Knight professor of business journalism at Columbia and the author of the book “A Beautiful Mind,” which inspired the movie of the same name, charges in the suit that the university mishandled funds from a $1.5 million endowment provided by the Knight Foundation to improve the school’s teaching of business journalism.

The full story is here, but here is a bit more:

Terms of the agreement called for Columbia to pay the professorship’s salary on its own, and use foundation funds for additional salary and benefits, like research…

In 2000, the university hired Ms. Nasar…According to the lawsuit she was given a base salary, which the university paid for out of Knight Foundation funds, and was asked to pay most of her additional expenses out of her own pocket.

Ms. Nasar said in the suit that over time she spent $174,000 of her own money for research and other expenses. She is asking for punitive damages.

Ms. Nasar said in an interview that in September 2010 she had received an e-mail from the university listing more than $70,000 in what she described as “phantom I.T. charges” — expenses attributed to her that she says she never incurred.

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Assorted links

by on March 7, 2013 at 1:31 pm in Uncategorized | Permalink

1. The long data of European Jewish expulsion.

2. The economics of hiring paralysis; this piece goes a lot further than does a lot of sticky wage theory, noting that the two can be combined into a larger final explanation.  Nonetheless it gives real support to “risk premium” theories.

3. Columbia thievery of Nutella becomes costly.

4. Potato parties lead to misconduct at McDonald’s Japan.

5. Jeremy Stein on reaching for yield, not my view but always worth hearing from dissenters.

6. Upgrade or die.

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Why Does Government Spending Increase Under Term Limits?

by on December 17, 2012 at 6:03 am in Political Science | Permalink

Many thanks to Alex for introducing me yesterday. Having written several papers on term limits, I will use my first post of the week to raise a new question that has emerged from this aging policy intervention: Why does government spending increase under term limits?

Back in the 1990s, when about half the states’ voters slapped term limits on their state legislators, the idea was to rein in government spending and decrease the growth of government. Instead, spending per capita increased in those states relative to states without term limits. See this empirical paper, this survey article, or this book this book for details.

These results are counterintuitive insofar as we put stock in the intended mechanism, which was simple: As legislators spend more time in office, they tend to vote for more government spending – so if legislators are required by law to spend less time in office, they’ll spend less money.

There are two problems with this. First, the premise that tenure and spending positively correlate has not held up to empirical scrutiny. Most papers found no positive link between tenure and spending, although a few reported small effects.

Besides, even if there were a strong tenure-spending correlation without term limits, that correlation is not likely to hold up once term limits are imposed. This is due to a version of the Lucas Critique (or Goodhart’s Law), which in general argues that observed behavioral patterns are not invariant to policy interventions. In this case, term limits will change the dynamics between voters and politicians in ways that lead to greater spending. More specifically, three explanations seem plausible.

  1. Term limitation exacerbates fiscal commons problems within the legislature. Because term limits decrease the variance of tenure within a legislature, the relative power of party leaders and ranking committee members will decrease. As the distribution of power flattens, this increases the proportion of legislators who possess access rights to budget items, thus decreasing the control rights that a relatively few leaders and committee chairs would otherwise have. When everyone can get their pet project through, more projects get through.
  2. Term limits shorten legislators’ time horizons. If legislators use their time in office to advance their careers, and if the career-value of being in the statehouse increases with the support of more spending, then term limits can impart an incentive to spend more and sooner. For example, rank-and-file legislators support more spending to secure leadership positions, and leaders let more projects through in order to quickly build durable coalitions.
  3. Term limits might lure legislators into very wasteful forms of pork spending, according to this paper by Michael Herron and Kenneth Shotts:

Term limits can, in some cases, inhibit voters from selecting representatives who deliver particularistic benefits, and, in these cases, term limits reduce pork spending. On the other hand, when pork is extremely socially inefficient, representatives who want to deliver pork to their districts have incentives to refrain from doing so to reduce future pork in other districts. In this scenario, term limits actually prevent legislators from promoting future spending moderation and thus paradoxically increase pork spending.

These explanations can, of course, be mutually inclusive. I suspect there is more to #1 and #2, if only because they are more salient.

In general, term limits increase spending because voters and legislators rationally respond to changes in their institutional environment. As this question invites further study, good papers will unpack the specific mechanisms that drive those responses.

— Notes: Since most people seem surprised by the actual effects of term limits, here are pointers to similar findings: Gubernatorial term limits worsen fiscal volatility — this paper (co-authored by my co-author Pete Calcagno) and this paper (by my dissertation advisor Bob Tollison) — because governors invest less in reputation (this paper). States with legislative term limits might also have worse bond ratings (here). Here on MR, neither Alex nor Tyler have put much stock in term limits, though Alex is less skeptical.

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Measuring Baumol and Bowen Effects in Public Research Universities

by on November 1, 2012 at 5:20 pm in Economics, Education | Permalink

That is a new paper by Robert E. Martin and R. Carter Hill:

We estimate three models of cost per student using data from Carnegie I and II public research universities. There are 841 usable observations covering the period from 1987 to 2008. We find that staffing ratios are individually and collectively significant in each model. Further, we find evidence that shared governance lowers cost and that the optimal staffing ratio is approximately three tenure track faculty members for every one full time administrator. Costs are higher if the ratio is higher or lower than three to one. As of 2008 the number of full time administrators is almost double the number of tenure track faculty. Using the differential method and the coefficients estimated in the three models, we deconstruct the real cost changes per student between 1987 and 2008 into Baumol and Bowen effects. This analysis reveals that for every $1 in Baumol cost effects there are over $2 in Bowen cost effects. Taken together, these results suggest two thirds of the real cost changes between 1987 and 2008 are due to weak shared governance and serious agency problems among administrators and boards.

For the pointer I thank Michael Tamada (who does not necessarily endorse the argument).

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Publishing pays in economics

by on October 23, 2012 at 12:00 pm in Data Source, Economics, Education | Permalink

Here is a new paper by Suzanne O’Keefe and Ta-Chen Wang:

We study salaries of economics faculty at the University of California to determine how publications affect salary. We find that each publication in a top 10 journal has a positive and significant effect on annual base salary of 1.5%, or $2,053. Unlike previous research, our analysis specifies the impact of publications in specific journals. Publications in American Economic Review, Econometrica, and Review of Economics and Statistics have an independent positive effect on salary. Compensation is also affected by faculty rank, seniority, university of employment, and teaching awards. Base salary does not significantly differ by gender, however, gross salary is about 9% lower for women. After controlling for migration and faculty rank, seniority has a negative impact on salary.

Here is a sentence of interest:

Full-time tenure-track economics faculty members in the UC system have gross salaries ranging from about $70,000 to $378,000.

Against my expectations, UCLA economics professors are paid more than 13k more, on average, than UC Berkeley economics professors.  The pay gap for women is larger in economics than in these universities as a whole.

The possibly gated article is here, and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.

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The peculiar case of higher education

by on April 14, 2012 at 7:26 am in Education | Permalink

Via a request from Ezra for topic coverage, here are some very good remarks from Ryan Avent.  Excerpt:

A sector dominated by the state—state-run in some cases, merely subsidised and regulated in others—is, I think most Americans would agree, both a major contributor to American prosperity and one of America’s most competitive industries on foreign markets, despite its glaring inefficiencies. What ought we to conclude based on this example?

Certainly, one could reasonably argue that the sector would be even better if state control were relaxed, monopolies broken up, subsidies curtailed, and market controls (like those on immigration) eliminated. But one also has to wrestle with how different the American economy would look if the state had never muscled public universities (including a broad network of technology-driven, extension-oriented schools) into existence.

This stuff is harder than we often pretend.

A few observations:

1. Postwar higher education has proven one of America’s most effective subsidies, and it has paid for itself many times over.  It is also one of the more significant successes of federalism.

2. We are fortunate that U.S. state universities are more or less autonomous, compared to the Continental model where professors and administrators are treated as part of the state civil service bureaucracy.  The latter system does not work well, and those countries have struggled to move closer to American models.

3. To refer back to a distinction from the David Brooks column, we should not be trying to squeeze the entire economy into the shoebox of the dynamic but risky “Economy I.”  For public choice reasons, as well understood by Karl Polanyi (an underrated public choice theorist if there ever was one), the polity requires some respite from Economy I, whether we like that or not.  Read also this analysis by Interfluidity, which is one of my favorite blog posts of all time.  Furthermore the more “sluggish” Economy II, by operating under different principles, often serves as a useful R&D lab for Economy I.  Think MIT and Stanford, or note that Adam Smith ended up as a customs commissioner, as his father had been.  Goethe and Bach worked for governments for much of their lives.  It’s about balance and synergy, though it is perfectly fair to see contemporary Western Europe, especially in the periphery, as a region which has far too much Economy II and too little Economy I.

4. Maintaining the truth of #1 will prove a significant challenge going forward.  It’s not about blaming the critics or defunders of state universities, or the critics of public subsidies to private universities.  The real problems are a few.  First, successful state programs tend to stultify and decline over time, and if nothing else the danger is that health care costs will eat up state budgets.  Second, the absolute returns to higher education (as opposed to the wage for not going) are not currently high enough to maintain the current fiscal structure of those institutions, furthermore those fiscal structures do not have so much “give,” due to tenure and various self-imposed cost inflexibilities.  Third, although most state universities have relatively little explicit debt, they are implicitly massively leveraged through reliance on ongoing tuition boosts, ongoing enrollment boosts, and timely retirements, none of which can be counted on in the future.

It will prove a daunting path forward.

Addendum: David Henderson comments.

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The boycott Elsevier movement

by on January 30, 2012 at 10:11 am in Economics, Science | Permalink

Many of you have asked me about this recent movement.  A few points:

1. I largely agree with the goals and views of the perpetrators.

2. If I never published again in an Elsevier journal, it would not hurt my career (I have been tenured for twenty-six years).  It would be a cheap endorsement for me personally.

3. In the past my career has benefited from publishing in Elsevier journals.  They have provided useful outlets for some of my pieces and for some of the pieces of my friends and colleagues.  Although I would prefer to move to a new and more open publishing model, I do count this past relationship for something.

4. In the future I likely will wish to help my students publish, including in Elsevier journals.

5. If I were to pick three boycotts to see through, would this be one of them?

My current conclusion is that I should not join this boycott in any formal sense, again while expressing support for the final vision.  I do contribute to the open science idea in a number of ways, including through this blog.

In my forthcoming An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies you will find a more extensive discussion of the economics and ethics of boycotts.

Addendum: Via Claire Morgan, here is an interesting discussion of metrics for on-line influence.

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Udacity

by on January 25, 2012 at 7:35 am in Education, Web/Tech | Permalink

In The Coming Education Revolution I discussed Sebatian Thurn and Peter Norvig’s online AI class from Stanford that ended up enrolling 160,000 students. Felix Salmon has the remarkable update:

…there were more students in [Thrun's] course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.

Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.

And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.

So what I was expecting was an announcement from Thrun that he was helping to reinvent university education: that he was moving all his Stanford courses online, that the physical class would be a space for students to get more personalized help. No more lecturing: instead, the classes would be taken on the students’ own time, and the job of the real-world professor would be to answer questions from kids paying $30,000 for their education.

But that’s not the announcement that Thrun gave. Instead, he said, he concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udacity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a search engine — and of course it’s all going to be free.

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Some new books in my pile

by on January 22, 2012 at 7:36 am in Books, Economics | Permalink

I am learning a good deal from Stephen Bainbridge’s Corporate Governance After the Financial Crisis:

There seems little doubt that the monitoring model has influenced board behavior.  In 1995, only one in eight CEOs [of those stepping down] was fired or resigned under board pressure.  By 2006, however, almost a third of CEOs were terminated involuntarily.  Over the last several decades, the average CEO tenure has decreased, which also has been attributed to more active board oversight.

I cannot say I am personally so interested in the topic of Ed Leamer’s The Craft of Economics: Lessons from the Heckscher-Ohlin Framework, but he is a master of exposition for complex economic results and this book is no exception.

Daniel Hausman’s Preference, Value, Choice and Welfare reflects his characteristic intelligence and judgment and it should be read by anyone with an interest in economic methodology.

Johan van Overtveldt’s The End of the Euro is a very good book on the background leading up to the current euro crisis; also useful is David Marsh’s The Euro: The Battle for the New Global Currency.

I still think Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science is an important book on an important topic.

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More on countercyclical restructuring and ZMP

by on November 22, 2011 at 7:33 am in Economics | Permalink

I have been reading some new results by David Berger (who by the way seems to be an excellent job market candidate, from Yale), here is one bit:

Finally, I discuss what changed in the 1980s. I provide suggestive evidence that the structural change was the result of a large decline in union power in the 1980s. This led to a sharp reduction in the restrictions …firms faced when adjusting employment, which lowered fi…ring costs and made it easier for fi…rms to …fire selectively. I test this hypothesis using variation from U.S. states and industries. I show that states and industries that had larger percentage declines in union coverage rates had larger declines in the cyclicality of ALP [average labor productivity], consistent with my hypothesis. The union power hypothesis is also consistent with evidence from detailed industry studies. A recent paper by Dunne, Klimek and Schmitz (2010) shows that there were dramatic changes in the structure of union contracts in the U.S. cement industry in the early-1980s, which gave establishments much more scope to …fire workers based on performance rather than tenure. They show that immediately after these workplace restrictions were lifted, ALP and TFP in the industry increased signifi…cantly.

This paper is a goldmine of information on the cyclical behavior of productivity and how it has changed in recent times.  Basically, we’re now at the point where a recession means they dump the bad workers and we subsequently have a jobless recovery.

While we’re on the broader topic, I’d like to make a few points about the recent ZMP (“zero marginal productivity“) debates between Kling, Caplan, Henderson, Boudreaux, and Eli Dourado:

1. There has been plenty of evidence for “labor hoarding”; oddly, once the ZMP workers start actually being fired, the concept suddenly becomes controversial.  The simple insight is that firms don’t hoard so much labor any more.

2. The ZMP worker concept can overlap with the sticky wage concept.  If a person is a prima donna who will sabotage production unless paid 120k a year and given the best office, that person has a sticky wage.  That same person also can be ZMP.  Very often the concept is about bad morale, not literal and universal incompetence; the ZMPers are often quite effective at sabotage!

3. No one thinks a worker is ZMP in all possible world-states.

4. The high and rising premium for good managers is another lens for viewing the phenomenon.  More workers could usefully be employed if we had more skilled supervisors, and thus the shadow value for a skilled supervisor is especially high.

5. Virtually everyone believes in the concept, although opinions differ as to how many workers it covers.  How about the people who are classified as having given up the search for work altogether?  There’s quite a few of them.  Put aside the blame question and the moralizing, can’t at least a few of these people — who aren’t even looking to work — be considered ZMP?

In any case, Berger’s concerns are more empirical and more concrete than some of the issues in those debates.  At the first link you also can find some very interesting papers, by Berger, on the cyclical behavior of price stickiness.  The observed data — surprise, surprise — are quite inconsistent with standard models.

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Assorted links

by on November 21, 2011 at 4:55 am in Uncategorized | Permalink

1. Ten questions for Charles C. Mann.

2. How to extract light from a vacuum, and how are those European bank runs coming along?  Faster than light neutrinos no longer looking so likely.

3. Solyndra solar panels on eBay.

4. How can a tenured professor be poor?

5. Does law school prepare people to be lawyers?

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Assorted links

by on October 29, 2011 at 5:26 pm in Uncategorized | Permalink

1. Resolution of Fairfax legal case, hat tip Yana.

2. Resolution of New Hampshire legal case, or how to keep tenure.

3. Penelope Trunk Home School blog.

4. The cure or the disease?

5. Can expectations be frustrated?, Interfluidity on NGDP targeting, and Scott Sumner’s response.

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Matt Rognile does not like the LM curve (nor does David Romer)

by on October 7, 2011 at 2:48 pm in Economics | Permalink

Read the whole post, here is one excerpt:

…many countries now operate under an inflation targeting framework, in which responding to inflation is the key feature of the policy rule. In this environment, depicting policy as a relationship between “Y” and “i” misses what’s really going on—better to abandon the upward-sloping LM curve altogether and use a simple horizontal line to depict the current policy rate. I’m not alone in this sentiment.

David Romer wrote an entire piece for the JEP in 2000 called Keynesian Macroeconomics without the LM Curve. (As the title suggests, he shares my feelings on the matter.) Tyler Cowen puts this at #6 on his list of grievances. It’s a pretty obvious point—yet, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, we still print thousands of undergraduate textbooks a year with LM front and center.

Matt is an economics Ph.d student at MIT and an expert in macroeconomics.

Here is a good quotation from the above-cited David Romer piece (Romer, by the way, is not a member of my tribe, in fact he is a tenured professor at Berkeley):

In short, recent developments work to the disadvantage of IS-LM. This observation suggests that it is time to revisit the question of whether IS-LM is the best choice as the basic model of short-run fluctuations we teach our undergraduates and use as a starting point for policy analysis. The thesis of this paper is that it is not.

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The Coming Education Revolution

by on August 7, 2011 at 7:35 am in Economics, Education | Permalink

From Metafilter:

Stanford’s ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ course will be offered free to anyone online this fall. The course will be taught by SebastianThrun (Stanford) and PeterNorvig (Google, Director of Research), who expect to deal with the historically large course size using tools like Google Moderator.

There will two 75 min lectures per week, weekly graded homework assignments and quizzes, and the course is expected to require roughly 10 hours per week. Over 10,000 students have already signed up.

In 2003, I argued that professors were becoming obsolete, giving a 10 to 20 year time for a big move to online education. Later, I pointed out that the market was moving towards superstar teachers, who teach hundreds at a time or even thousands online. Today, we have the Khan Academy, a huge increase in online education, electronic textbooks and peer grading systems and highly successful superstar teachers with Michael Sandel and his popular course Justice, serving as example number one.

One of the last remaining items holding back online education is a credible system to credential and compare student achievement across universities. Arnold Kling has that covered with a new business model.

For superstars and strong researchers, life in the ivory tower remains good. But for most teachers the cushy life is gone; tenure is just a dream for a majority of university teachers, salaries are low and teaching requirements have risen.

As in other fields what we are seeing is an increase in teaching inequality, at the top are high-salary superstars surrounded by apprentices who work long hours at low pay for a lottery ticket that for most will not payoff and at the bottom are lots of mid-skill adjuncts who do the drudge work of teaching remedial English and math.

Addendum: Tim Worstall points to the UK’s University of London as a model for the future.

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