orgtheory.net

The Freakonomics blog drew my attention to this new paper about the determinants of reputation among economists.  Because they’re also interested in the link between reputation and salary (and because they’re economists), they refer to this as a “market for reputation.” The findings are pretty interesting. They find that quantity of publications, sometimes referred to among academics as “productivity,” is not predictive of reputation. Publication quality is predictive of reputation. When doling out honors, such as Nobel Prizes, economists tend to favor the scholars that have had the biggest scholarly impact (as can be seen via citation counts) rather than scholars that have just published a lot. They find, however, that publication quantity has a significant positive effect on wages, and quality has less of an impact on salary than it does on reputation.  Moreover, quantity also appears to help people change jobs more frequently. More productive scholars are more mobile than their less productive colleagues.

So what explains this disconnect between reputation and salary? Is the market rewarding economists ineffectively? My impression is that deans/department heads weigh productivity heavily when determining wages because there is so much uncertainty about quality. Citation impact comes over time. It may take years before enough citations accumulate to determine whether someone has made an important contribution. But salaries are rewarded in a shorter time-frame, based on annual merit increases. Given unfamiliarity with one’s work and quality uncertainty, scholars are rewarded with merit increases based almost entirely on their recent productivity. The other reason for the disconnect may have something to do with how reputation is distributed in economics. When there are a limited number of high reputation positions, because of the small number of honors given each year, economists may become very stingy about how they assign those positions. If they could subjectively rank economists along some sort of continuum each year, my guess is that productivity/quantity would matter more to reputation.