Incentives, Performance, and Academic Tenure

Abstract:     
This paper investigates the productivity (total number of papers) and impact (citations of papers) of 249 economists before and after their tenure promotion. Three theoretical arguments seem to point to a decline in performance after tenure. The literature on explicit incentives suggests that in the absence of the incentives associated with tenure, academics would slack off after tenure. The literature on implicit incentives predicts that economic agents work too hard early in their careers and not hard enough later. A third argument might be that the economists were granted tenure conditional on having achieved a certain high level of performance, and the decline in performance after tenure would be a natural outcome of a statistical process that regresses to its mean. Empirically, this paper finds that while the economists' productivity may or may not decline significantly after tenure, depending on the empirical specification, their impact consistently remains the same before and after tenure. Since impact is arguably a better measure of an academic's performance than productivity, our empirical results cannot conclude that these academic economists slacked off after tenure. We argue that our results perhaps imply that achieving certain goals or milestones serves as an implicit incentive. For example, an academic who wants to become a leader in his research field may still work hard after tenure. Capturing this form of implicit incentive in an agency model would represent an interesting extension of the current literature on career concerns.

JEL Classifications: A20

Working Paper Series