Kyle R. Myers, Wei Yang Tham, Jerry Thursby, Marie Thursby, Nina Cohodes, Karim Lakhani, Rachel Mural, Yilun Xu
{"title":"New Facts and Data about Professors and their Research","authors":"Kyle R. Myers, Wei Yang Tham, Jerry Thursby, Marie Thursby, Nina Cohodes, Karim Lakhani, Rachel Mural, Yilun Xu","doi":"arxiv-2312.01442","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"We introduce a new survey of professors at roughly 150 of the most\nresearch-intensive institutions of higher education in the US. We document\nseven new features of how research-active professors are compensated, how they\nspend their time, and how they perceive their research pursuits: (1) there is\nmore inequality in earnings within fields than there is across fields; (2)\ninstitutions, ranks, tasks, and sources of earnings can account for roughly\nhalf of the total variation in earnings; (3) there is significant variation\nacross fields in the correlations between earnings and different kinds of\nresearch output, but these account for a small amount of earnings variation;\n(4) measuring professors' productivity in terms of output-per-year versus\noutput-per-research-hour can yield substantial differences; (5) professors'\nbeliefs about the riskiness of their research are best predicted by their\nfundraising intensity, their risk-aversion in their personal lives, and the\ndegree to which their research involves generating new hypotheses; (6) older\nand younger professors have very different research outputs and time\nallocations, but their intended audiences are quite similar; (7) personal\nrisk-taking is highly predictive of professors' orientation towards applied,\ncommercially-relevant research.","PeriodicalId":501487,"journal":{"name":"arXiv - QuantFin - Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"arXiv - QuantFin - Economics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/arxiv-2312.01442","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
We introduce a new survey of professors at roughly 150 of the most
research-intensive institutions of higher education in the US. We document
seven new features of how research-active professors are compensated, how they
spend their time, and how they perceive their research pursuits: (1) there is
more inequality in earnings within fields than there is across fields; (2)
institutions, ranks, tasks, and sources of earnings can account for roughly
half of the total variation in earnings; (3) there is significant variation
across fields in the correlations between earnings and different kinds of
research output, but these account for a small amount of earnings variation;
(4) measuring professors' productivity in terms of output-per-year versus
output-per-research-hour can yield substantial differences; (5) professors'
beliefs about the riskiness of their research are best predicted by their
fundraising intensity, their risk-aversion in their personal lives, and the
degree to which their research involves generating new hypotheses; (6) older
and younger professors have very different research outputs and time
allocations, but their intended audiences are quite similar; (7) personal
risk-taking is highly predictive of professors' orientation towards applied,
commercially-relevant research.