Research / BFI Working PaperJul 15, 2019

Monopsony Power in Higher Education: A Tale of Two Tracks

This paper tests for and measures monopsony power in the U.S. higher education labor market. It does so by directly estimating the residual labor supply curves facing individual four-year colleges and universities using school-specific labor demand instruments. The results indicate that schools have significant monopsony power over their tenure track faculty. Its magnitude is monotonic in rank, being greatest over full professors and smaller for associate and assistant professors. For non-tenure track faculty, however, universities do not seem to have any monopsony power and instead face perfectly elastic residual labor supply curves. Universities’ market power over tenure track faculty does not differ between public and private schools nor between female and male faculty. Monopsony power is greater for larger universities, and the geographic market for faculty seems to be national rather than local. Monopsony power is also larger at higher-status institutions as measured by Carnegie classifications, average test scores of the undergraduate student body, or initial salary rankings. The results also suggest that monopsony power has contributed to the trend toward non-tenure track faculty in U.S.

More Research From These Scholars

BFI Working Paper Nov 8, 2021

The Anatomy of a Hospital System Merger: The Patient Did Not Respond Well to Treatment

Martin Gaynor, Adam Sacarny, Raffaella Sadun, Chad Syverson, Shruthi Venkatesh
Topics:  Health care
BFI Working Paper Jun 2, 2023

Micro- and Macroeconomic Impacts of a Place-Based Industrial Policy

Enghin Atalay, Ali Hortaçsu, Mustafa Runyun, Chad Syverson, Mehmet Fatih Ulu
Topics:  Industrial Organization
BFI Working Paper Sep 1, 2018

The Productivity J-Curve: How Intangibles Complement General Purpose Technologies

Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, Chad Syverson
Topics:  Uncategorized