We are grateful to the Northwestern University Registrar's office, office of admissions, and office of human resources for providing the data necessary to carry out this analysis, and to numerous colleagues for helpful suggestions. Caitlin Ahearn and Christine Mulhern provided exceptional research assistance. All opinions and errors are our own. We have not received research support for this project. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
The system of academic tenure has come under increasing scrutiny. The authors provide a brief review of the tenure literature, discuss some recent tenure controversies, and present basic data on the percentage of faculty subject to the tenure system. The issue of tenure is discussed in terms of how the authority necessary to run a college or university is delegated. The authors believe that this perspective sheds light on some underlying reasons for why tenure differs from other forms of labor contracting and on the reasons for the relative importance of the tenure system in different parts of higher education.
We are grateful to the Northwestern University Registrar's office, office of admissions, and office of human resources for providing the data necessary to carry out this analysis, and to numerous colleagues for helpful suggestions. Caitlin Ahearn and Christine Mulhern provided exceptional research assistance. All opinions and errors are our own. We have not received research support for this project.
ABSTRACTThis study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus non-tenure line faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student's first term at Northwestern, and employ a unique identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which non-tenure line faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from non-tenure line professors in their introductory courses. These differences are present across a wide variety of subject areas, and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern's average students and less-qualified students.
This paper presents a relative cohort size model of suicide. The model states that as relative cohort size (the ratio of younger to older workers) rises, income and income aspirations diverge for the young. One possible extreme reaction to this disequilibrium is suicide. The model explains the variation in age- and sex-specific suicide rates for the United States over the period 1948 to 1976. It identifies the direct effect of changes in cohort size on suicide rates as well as the indirect effect operating through other demographic variables. The model predicts the suicide rates for males above 45 years of age to rise and those for all other groups to decline. For most groups this is a reversal of recent movements in their suicide rates.
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