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Do insiders have an advantage getting tenure?
Yes:
At most universities there are two types of tenured economists – those that came to the school shortly after leaving graduate school (and were later promoted) and experienced economists that were hired with tenure. Conventional wisdom in academic circles suggests that it is easier to get tenure as an insider than it is to attract an offer as an outsider. That is, schools hold potential external senior hires to tougher standards than the requirements for promotion of the school’s junior professors. In this paper, I take a first step towards showing that, at least for academic economists, there is an insider advantage. I analyze the research records of economists with ten years of experience and compare the productivity of those who recently changed employers (suggesting they were hired with tenure) to those that did not (suggesting internal promotion.) I show that the productivity of “outsiders” is higher than the productivity of “insiders” at all but the top 10 economics institutions in the world.
That is from the May 2007 American Economic Review, here is one version of the paper. I have seen much anecdotal evidence in support of these results, though never at my school. I wonder, however, how much of this trend can be justified by efficiency, given that departments engage in some amount of team production. If a department --especially a non-top department -- has a true jerk, it really does make everyone else less productive.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 13, 2007 at 05:51 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
The fact that the large sample averages are similar suggests this is more about selection effects than insider advantages.
Departments tenuring insiders are going to see higher variance. Some will develop reputations below the department average, while others will be way above. The latter are more likely to leave.
Conversely you will never want to hire a senior professor whose known rep is below your department average. Nonetheless expected quality at time of tenure might well be similar for insiders and outsiders. Only the distribution of insider post-tenure outcomes will be different.
So I don't see how Oyer's paper distinguishes between selection effects (you almost certainly don't want to hire seniors whose long-term rep is below the dept average) vs unobservables (insiders are productive on important margins that aren't on the vita, outsiders are more likely to be jerks)
Posted by: jn at Jun 13, 2007 8:07:43 AM
Slightly off-topic, but I once commented at the blog Crooed Timber about how I thought academics didn't understand how good they had it with tenure. And that most of the world's workers would love a system with such job security.
In response one of their bloggers put up a post on how a high percentage of society has defacto tenure and very little risk of losing their jobs. Which seemed further evidence of how ignorant academics are of the day-to-day economic competition most of us face.
Posted by: Dirk at Jun 13, 2007 8:14:25 AM
Or evidence that you don't understand how the academic world works.
How much economic competition do businesspeople face? Upper management routinely makes six, seven, eight figures a year, so even if things were to get difficult they should have plenty of savings to fall back on.
Wait, this isn't actually a good argument?
Posted by: Barbar at Jun 13, 2007 8:55:47 AM
Perhaps I am wrong, but might part of the issue be salary. University X promotes an insider - insider gets a slight bump in pay. University X hires an outsider at a substantial pay increase over what he was making before (possibly over what the insider is making). Or do external hires not receive salary increases above the average (or median) at their time of hire? I am new to the real world of academics, the type they don't show you on E! or talk about in magazines, so maybe I'm wrong.
Posted by: AZ at Jun 13, 2007 9:08:03 AM
I think the pattern reflects something like the following:
At the very top departments there is a strong commitment to official standards of research achievement. At non-top departments there is less commitment. William Davis's work (in AJES, EJW) confirms that about half of economists see the official professional stuff as a game without real social benefits. Accordingly, at the non-top departments, when deciding an internal tenure case, the focal question is: "Is it really fair to deny this person tenure? True, he doesn't have a lot of top publications, but is it really fair to hold that strongly against him?"
When deciding an external hire with tenure, however, the non-top dept members coordinate on the official criteria because they have nothing much else to coordinate on, and tend to hire people more accomplished (at least in those ways) than the people promoted internally.
At the top depts, people take the official stuff more seriously, and feel justified in denying when the record along those lines isn't as strong as that of one they could bring in from outside. At top depts, the greater focality of the official stuff makes its justness operable in both directions (denying and hiring).
My main basis is introspection. At all my places of academic employment, I have always tended to support internal tenure applications. If they teach well and do some good stuff that actually helps society, why in hell care that they haven't published in prestigious journals?
I recently coauthored with Romero a paper maintaining that the Journal of Economic Theory, "the leading journal of economic theory," contains very little theory, as opposed to mere model building. I'm supposed to hold not publishing in such journals against someone?
Incidentally, the paper with Romero is at:
http://www.econjournalwatch.org/pdf/KleinRomeroEconomicsInPracticeMay2007.pdf
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Jun 13, 2007 9:16:25 AM
though never at my school
Posted by: otto at Jun 13, 2007 9:46:01 AM
More evidence that academia is just as narcissistic as Hollywood.
Posted by: jurisnaturalist at Jun 13, 2007 10:28:19 AM
"....experienced economists that were hired with a tenure."
Is there a grammatical error in the above sentence?
Adding "group of" between words "experienced" and "economists" is desirable.
Posted by: ponmel at Jun 13, 2007 10:56:38 AM
AZ is right - the output per salary dollar might be no different, since outsiders are paid considerably more than insiders.
Posted by: Robin Hanson at Jun 13, 2007 11:09:18 AM
Dan,
"I'm supposed to hold not publishing in such journals against someone?"
For any "such journals" I'd say no, but are there others that you have found to be on par with JET?
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