Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Salary equity studies have long been used to illuminate pay disparities among higher education faculty based on gender (e.g., Ginther, 2004); race and ethnicity (e.g., Webber and Gonzales Canche, 2015); organizational loyalty (Barbezat, 2004; Cohen, 2009; Masakure, 2016), and scholarly discipline (Hearn, 1999; Curtis and Thornton, 2013; Curtis and Kisielewski, 2015). Our study contributes to the literature by disentangling the contributions of discipline, departmental affiliation and gender in faculty pay differentials for schools of public affairs.

Three key observations motivate our analysis. First, we observe that schools of public affairs hire many economists. Second, we observe that those economists are disproportionately female. Finally, we observe that salaries in schools of public affairs are, on average, lower than salaries in mainline departments of economics. We seek to understand the linkage, if any, among these three new styled facts.

Using various data sources, we assembled a unique database of over 2,150 faculty salary profiles from the top 50 Public Affairs Schools in the United States as well as the corresponding Economics and Political Science departments in their home universities. For each faculty member we collected compensation data to analyze the relationship between field of specialization, department placement, and annual salary compensation. In addition, we also control for measures of scholarly productivity, such as, citation counts, h-indices, and i10-indices.

There are a couple of takeaways from our analysis here. First, we found substantial pay differences based on departmental affiliation. Economists in schools of public affairs were paid at a significant discount compared to their counterparts employed in traditional departments of economics. Second, the public affairs discount could not be explained by compositional differences. Controlling for gender, experience and various indicators of research productivity only widened the salary gap between economics departments and schools of public affairs. Lastly, we found evidence that citation records differed by gender, discipline and departmental affiliation; and that salary differences between male and female faculty members were not statistically significant once these differences in citation records were taken into account. We found no evidence that the return to citations was systematically higher (or lower) for male than for female faculty members in the institutions of higher education under analysis.