Labor Economics Commons^™

Why Tenure? An Optimal Contract Perspective, Zhengzheng Qian

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In academia, after a reasonable probationary period of service and upon the achievement of tenure, the recipients of tenure are entitled to a continuing appointment at an institution without mandatory retirement and with only limited grounds for revocation. Advocates of tenure argued that it protected academic freedom through economic security. Opponents of tenure argued that it fostered inefficient and unproductive behavior. This dissertation developed a framework for examining academic tenure in U.S. economics departments. I constructed a dataset of tenured U.S. economics professors who were Ph.D. recipients between 1990 and 2006 and tracked their publications. In the first chapter, based …