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A Bayesian look at American academic wages: From wage dispersion to wage compression

Author

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  • Majda Benzidia

    (AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Michel Lubrano

    (AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, School of Economics, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics)

Abstract

OECD countries have experienced a large increase in top wage inequality. Atkinson (2008) attributes this phenomena to the superstar theory leading to a Pareto tail in the wage distribution with a low Pareto coefficient. Do we observe a similar phenomena for academic wages? We examine wage formation in a public US university using for each academic rank a hybrid mixture formed by a lognormal distribution for regular wages and a Pareto distribution for top wages, using a Bayesian approach. The presence of superstars wages would imply a higher dispersion in the Pareto tail than in the lognormal body. We concluded that academic wages are formed in a different way than other top wages. There is an effort to propose competitive wages to some young Assistant Professors. But when climbing up the wage ladder, we found a phenomenon of wage compression which is just the contrary of a superstar phenomenon.

Suggested Citation

  • Majda Benzidia & Michel Lubrano, 2020. "A Bayesian look at American academic wages: From wage dispersion to wage compression," Post-Print hal-02566630, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02566630
    DOI: 10.1007/s10888-019-09431-9
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    Cited by:

    1. Marco Bee, 2024. "On discriminating between lognormal and Pareto tail: an unsupervised mixture-based approach," Advances in Data Analysis and Classification, Springer;German Classification Society - Gesellschaft für Klassifikation (GfKl);Japanese Classification Society (JCS);Classification and Data Analysis Group of the Italian Statistical Society (CLADAG);International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS), vol. 18(2), pages 251-269, June.
    2. Fourrier-Nicolaï Edwin & Lubrano Michel, 2024. "Bayesian inference for non-anonymous growth incidence curves using Bernstein polynomials: an application to academic wage dynamics," Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics, De Gruyter, vol. 28(2), pages 319-336, April.

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