Digital Commons Network^™

Labor Market Data Needs Relating To Antidiscrimination Activity: Comment, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Barbara Bergmann's background paper divides data needs in the antidiscrimination area into data that would be useful in the formulation of national policy and data that would be useful as an aid in enforcing the laws and executive orders against discrimination. Although the former are likely to be of greatest concern to the commission, she has performed a valuable service by discussing these interrelated needs in one place. I find much to agree with, and very little to disagree with or question, in her paper. The presentation is, in the main, an objective one and she tempers her desire …

Review Of The Book Nonmonetary Eligibility In State Unemployment Insurance Programs: Law And Practice, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] This monograph focuses on a relatively under-researched topic, namely, the effects of nonmonetary eligibility rules for both initial receipt of benefits and continued receipt once benefits are granted on the rates at which UI benefits are denied to applicants. The authors very competently employ both econometric and case study research methods to address these issues. Their econometric work utilizes quarterly state-level data between 1964 and 1981 and a fixed-effects framework to isolate those parameters of state unemployment insurance laws that influence denial rates. To supplement these analyses, they conduct interviews with key state and local program officials in six …

Review Of The Book Labor Relations And The Litigation Explosion, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Labor Relations and the Litigation Explosion is a very readable book that is easily accessible to nonspecialists. (The author has presented more technical treatments of the material elsewhere; see Flanagan 1986a, 1986b.) The early chapters begin with a discussion of federal policy towards labor relations in the United States under the National Labor Relations Act, a documentation of the growth of unfair labor practice charges that occurred over the 1950-1980 period and then a demonstration that this growth can be only partially "explained" by the changing industrial and regional distribution of employment in the United States. Quite interestingly, he …

Review Of The Book Wage Indexation In The United States: Cola Or Uncola?, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Hendricks and Kahn's book is a major contribution to the literature on wage indexation. The authors, together with a team of graduate assistants, have painstakingly put together a data file from Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of National Affairs sources that covers over 10,000 individual contract negotiations during the 1967-82 period. A major portion of their book is devoted to econometric analyses of these data; specifically, analyses of the determinants of COLA incidence, the determinants of COLA strength, the effect of COLAs on wage inflation, and the effect of COLAs on strike activity. Earlier versions of some of …

Reaching For The Brass Ring: The U.S. News & World Report Rankings And Competition, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The behavior of academic institutions, including the extent to which they collaborate on academic and nonacademic matters, is shaped by many factors. This paper focuses on one of these factors, the U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) annual ranking of the nation’s colleges and universities as undergraduate institutions, exploring how this ranking exacerbates the competitiveness among American higher education institutions. After presenting some evidence on the importance of the USNWR rankings to both public and private institutions at all levels along the selectivity spectrum, I describe how the rankings actually are calculated, then discuss how academic institutions alter their …

The 1995 Nrc Ratings Of Doctoral Programs: A Hedonic Model, Ronald Ehrenberg, Peter Hurst

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

We describe how one can use multivariate regression models and data collected by the National Research Council as part of its recent ranking of doctoral programs (Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States: Continuity and Change) to analyze how measures of program size, faculty seniority, faculty research productivity, and faculty productivity in producing doctoral degrees influence subjective ratings of doctoral programs in 35 academic fields. Using data for one of the fields, economics, we illustrate how university administrators can use the models to compute the impact of changing the number of faculty positions they allocate to the field on …

Advance Notice Provisions In Plant Closing Legislation: Do They Matter?, Ronald Ehrenberg, George Jakubson

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

This paper evaluates the cases for and against plant closing legislation. In spite of the growth of legislative efforts in the area, there has been surprisingly little effort devoted to analyzing what the effects are of existing plant closing legislation, of provisions in privately negotiated collective bargaining agreements that provide for advance notice in case of plant shutdowns and/or layoffs, and of voluntary employer provision of advance notice. The paper summarizes the results of previous research, and our own empirical analyses that used the January 1984 Bureau of Labor Statistics Survey of Displaced Workers, on the effects of advance notice …

Did Teachers’ Race And Verbal Ability Matter In The 1960’S? Coleman Revisited, Ronald Ehrenberg, Dominic Brewer

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Our paper reanalyzes data from the classic 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, or Coleman Report. It addresses whether teacher characteristics, including race and verbal ability, influenced "synthetic gain scores" of students (mean test scores of upper grade students in a school minus mean test scores of lower grade students in a school), in the context of an econometric model that allows for the possibility that teacher characteristics in a school are endogenously determined. We find that verbal aptitude scores of teachers influenced synthetic gain scores for both black and white students. Verbal aptitude mattered as much for black teachers …

Generation X: Redefining The Norms Of The Academy, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The members of Generation X are the young faculty members of today and the immediate future. The panelists at this session of the conference were asked to discuss the effects of this generation on academic norms and institutional governance and the types of new models that may be emerging for academia as a result of them. More specifically, they were asked if the attitudes and loyalties of these young faculty members really do differ from that of the Baby Boom Generation, how their attitudes and behavior affect graduate programs, what academic institutions will need to do to attract the …

Unequal Progress: The Annual Report On The Economic Status Of The Profession 2002-03, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Most colleges and universities adopted budgets for the 2002-03 academic year in the spring and early summer of 2002. At that time, a pessimist might have cited several factors – negative rates of return from institutional endowments, a rising unemployment rate, an economic recession, and large increases in college and university enrollments, for example - to predict that faculty members would not see their earnings increase substantially in real terms in the coming year. The good news is that, overall and on average, the pessimists' worst fears proved incorrect. The bad news is that the overall aver-ages don't tell …

The Changing Distributions Of New Ph.D. Economists And Their Employment: Implications For The Future, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Academic careers are no longer the be-all and end-all for economics Ph.D. students, and the findings and background provided by Siegfried and Stock help to explain why this is so. The median age at which individuals receive economics Ph.D.'s in the Siegfried and Stock sample is 32. While they are somewhat surprised at this finding, it parallels the experiences of many other fields. Increasingly, students are working before proceeding to doctoral studies. Often Ph.D. students in economics enter their programs after having spent several years working for government agencies or research consulting companies—work that has whetted their appetites for …

Do Economics Departments With Lower Tenure Probabilities Pay Higher Faculty Salaries?, Ronald Ehrenberg, Paul Pieper, Rachel Willis

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

The simplest competitive labor market model asserts that if tenure is a desirable job characteristic for professors, they should be willing to pay for it by accepting lower salaries. Conversely, if an institution unilaterally reduces the probability that its assistant professors receive tenure, it will have to pay higher salaries to attract new faculty. Our paper tests this theory using data on salary offers accepted by new assistant professors at economics departments in the United States during the 1974-75 to 1980-81 period, along with data on the proportion of new Ph.D.s hired by each department between 1970 and 1980 that …

The Impact Of Retirement Policies On Employment And Unemployment, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] This paper has focused on the impact of retirement policies on the level and distribution of employment and unemployment. All of the policies discussed, except for early retirement provisions in privately negotiated collective bargaining contracts were seen to have adverse effects on the level and distribution of employment. Hence, the paper illustrates the more general point that policies designed to promote one social goal may well detract from achieving other goals and suggests that more explicit attention should be given to the employment effects of social programs and legislation prior to their adoption.

How Would Universities Respond To Increased Federal Support For Graduate Students?, Ronald Ehrenberg, Daniel Rees, Dominic Brewer

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] This paper has demonstrated that doctorate-producing universities respond to changes in the number of FTSEG students supported on external funds by altering the number of FTSEG students that they support on institutional funds. While institutional adjustment to changes in external support levels appears to be quite rapid, in the aggregate the magnitude of these responses is quite small. A increase of 100 in the number of FTSEG students supported by external funds is estimated to reduce the number supported on institutional funds by 22 to 23. Since some of the institutional funds that are "saved" may be redirected to …

Institutional Responses To Increased External Support For Graduate Students, Ronald Ehrenberg, Daniel Rees, Dominic Brewer

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

This paper uses institutionally based data to estimate how universities would respond to increased federal support for graduate students. It demonstrates that doctorate-producing universities do respond to changes in the number of full-time science and engineering students supported on external funds by altering the number of students that they support on institutional funds. Institutional adjustment to changes in external support levels appears to be quite rapid. However, in the aggregate, the magnitude of these responses is quite small.

Black Youth Nonemployment: Duration And Job Search: Comment, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Holzer's paper has a number of attributes that I find very appealing. It focuses on an important topic and uses two different data bases to test the robustness of its findings. It uses alternative specifications of the variable of interest (reservation wages), examines the sensitivity of the results to alternative sets of control variables, uses a variety of statistical methods to confront a number of statistical issues, and honestly reports cases in which any of the above leads to differences in results. Finally, the paper does not claim more than the evidence warrants—a feature not present in enough academic …

Do Tournaments Have Incentive Effects?, Ronald Ehrenberg, Michael Bognanno

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Much attention has been devoted to studying models of tournaments or situations in which an individual's payment depends only on his or her output or rank relative to that of other competitors. Academic interest derives from the fact that under certain sets of assumptions, tournaments have desirable normative properties because of the incentive structures they provide. Our paper uses nonexperimental data to test whether tournaments actually elicit effort responses. We focus on professional golf tournaments because information on the incentive structure (prize distribution) and measures of individual output (players' scores) are both available. We find strong support for the proposition …

The Graduate Education Initiative: Description And Preliminary Findings, Ronald Ehrenberg, Harriet Zuckerman, Jeffrey Groen, Sharon Brucker

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] In1991 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (hereafter GEI) to improve the structure and organization of PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences. Such changes were seen as necessary to combat high rates of student attrition and long times-to-degree in these programs. While attrition and time-to-degree were deemed to be important in and of themselves, and of great significance to degree seekers, they were also seen more broadly as indicators of the effectiveness of graduate programs. Several characteristics of doctoral programs were earmarked as contributing to high attrition and long degree time, including: unclear …

Introduction [To Advance Notice Provisions In Plant Closing Legislation], Ronald Ehrenberg, George Jakubson

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Do Compensation Policies Matter?, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The papers in this volume should give the reader a sense of the exciting empirical research that has recently taken place on compensation-related issues. As a set, these papers considerably expand our empirical evidence on the effects of compensation policies. Several papers show that executive compensation is structured in a way that at least implicitly ties executive compensation changes to measures of corporate performance, and —crucially—that doing so leads to improved corporate performance (Leonard, Murphy/Gibbons, Abowd). Others show that compensation systems that pay workers for performance, in the sense of providing explicit or implicit incentives for high levels of …

Do Expenditures Other Than Instructional Expenditures Affect Graduation And Persistence Rates In American Higher Education, Douglas Webber, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Rates of tuition increases in both private and public higher education that continually exceed inflation, coupled with the fact that the United States no longer leads the world in terms of the fraction of our young adults who have college degrees, have focused attention on why costs keep increasing in higher education and what categories of higher education expenditures have been growing the most rapidly. In a series of publications, the Delta Cost Project has shown that during the last two decades median instructional spending per full-time equivalent (FTE) student in both public and private 4-year colleges and universities …

Unemployment Insurance, Duration Of Unemployment, And Subsequent Wage Gain, Ronald Ehrenberg, Ronald Oaxaca

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] In order to evaluate what the "optimal" level of UI benefits is, one must therefore first estimate the magnitude of the relationships between UI benefits levels and unemployed workers' durations of unemployment and post-unemployment wages. There have been several previous studies of the impact of UI benefits on duration of spells of unemployment, however none have been completely satisfactory methodologically. To our knowledge, there have been no previous studies of the system's impact on subsequent wage rates. We attempt to fill these gaps, utilizing data from the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) to estimate both relationships. The plan of our …

Do Trustees And Administrators Matter? Diversifying The Faculty Across Gender Lines, Ronald Ehrenberg, George Jakubson, Mirinda Martin, Joyce Main, Thomas Eisenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Our paper focuses on the role that the gender composition of the leaders of American colleges and universities – trustees, presidents/chancellors, and provosts/academic vice presidents – plays in influencing the rate at which academic institutions diversify their faculty across gender lines. Our analyses make use of institutional level panel data that we have collected for a large sample of American academic institutions.

We find, other factors held constant including our estimate of the “expected” share of new hires that should be female, that institutions with female presidents/chancellors and female provosts/academic vice presidents, as well as those with a greater share …

Financial Prospects For American Higher Education In The First Decade Of The Twenty-First Century, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] In an important paper written for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, Harold Hovey pointed out that even if economic growth continued, the outlook for state funding of public higher education might not be as rosy as it had been in the recent past. My objective in this paper is to speculate about the financial futures of both public and private higher education, using Hovey’s paper as a base. After outlining his argument about the hard times ahead for public higher education, I will discuss the responses that campus and system administrators may well undertake. I …

Reducing Inequality In Higher Education: Where Do We Go From, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Differences in inequality in college enrollment rates across students from families of different socioeconomic levels have only marginally narrowed since the early 1970s. Moreover, students from lower-income families are much more likely to start higher education in two-year public colleges and public four-year institutions than are their higher income counterparts. Among students who initially enter four-year institutions, six year graduation rates of students from families with incomes of less than $50,000 are substantially less than the graduation rates of students from families with incomes of more than $75,000. Finally, at a set of our nation’s most selective private colleges …

Collective Bargaining And Staff Salaries In American Colleges And Universities, Daniel Klaff, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Previous studies of union wage effects in higher education have examined faculty salaries, but not staff salaries. This study, using data from a 1997-98 survey conducted by the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers and other sources, investigates how union coverage affected staff salaries at 163 U.S. colleges and universities. The authors estimate a union salary premium of 9- 11%, with variation from near zero for some of the 47 occupations in their sample to 13-16% for others, such as the skilled building trades. The union/ nonunion differential appears to be larger in 2-year than in 4-year institutions, but does …

Graduate Education, Innovation And Federal Responsibility , Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

This paper, presented at the ORAU/CGS Conference on Graduate Education and American Competitiveness in Washington, discusses the causes and for the drop in American PhD students across the country, and lists the implications for that trend for American competitiveness. The author argues that the mobility of graduate students, and PhD students in particular, threatens state funding for graduate education, and that an increased federal role is now necessary.