The Unknown Professor points us to Pay Peanuts and Get Monkeys? Evidence from Academia a clever paper on adverse selection in academia. In New Zealand academic salaries are mostly independent of discipline so someone from a high-flying field like economics or finance is giving up a big American salary to teach in NZ compared to say a professor of literature. As a result, we ought to expect that the greater the salary in the U.S. the lower the quality in New Zealand.
…discipline research performance is indeed
negatively related to the value of outside opportunities: the greater a
discipline’s average salary in United States universities, the weaker
its research performance in New Zealand universities. The latter
apparently get what they pay for: disciplines in which the fixed
compensation is high relative to opportunity cost are best able to
recruit high-quality researchers and/or motivate their researchers to
be productive. Paying (relative) peanuts attracts mainly monkeys.
It’s a good paper, thus I expect the author will soon leave New Zealand.
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The assumption about salaries being the only factor is questionable. I studied in New Zealand with some exceptional professors. Without a doubt, the salaries were less. But look at the lifestyle, the climate, the sports. The food. The long lazy sundays in the world’s best coffee shops?
I miss it still.
[In New Zealand academic salaries are mostly independent of discipline so someone from a high-flying field like economics or finance is giving up a big American salary to teach in NZ compared to say a professor of literature]
Not sure how you get to this conclusion from the table in Appendix 1 Alex. Economics has an average quality score in New Zealand of 2.97 and English Language & Literature has 2.74. Which indicates that if anything the literature professors have better career opportunities elsewhere as there are more “monkeys” left in New Zealand, but it is so close as to indicate probably no difference (we don’t actually get direct data on remuneration shortfalls but this is the direction the research is pointing in). The slope of the line appears to be driven by a very good Philosophy department (which I think is built around a couple of very good individuals in Wellington), the statistics department at Canterbury and then some Anthropology, Ecology and Earth Sciences disciplines where NZ clearly has a geographical comparative advantage.
Now wait just a gol dang minute. Didn’t you just say (or imply) in another post that paying public school teachers more is just a union plot and won’t result in better education? Or am I confusing you with your counterpart or his evil twin?
Education has one of the lowest average quality levels in the appendix at 0.98, so how is that a better example?
[David, above, neglects that the nonpecuniaries should be expected to be constant across disciplines]
This strikes me as probably not true; for marine biologists, anthropologists, and quite afew other disciplines (a lot of which I note have high quality scores), there is a lot of benefit to being in New Zealand rather than, say, Chicago. New Zealand’s got a lot of mountains but few theatres and I would guess that this nonpecuniary benefit would be valued differently by the kind of person who becomes a geologist as opposed to the kind of person who becomes a professor of literature.
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