Salary Patterns of Agricultural Economists in the Early 1980s

Abstract

Systematic explanation of wages in the service sector typically has been hampered by the absence of information on physical productivity of service workers. Frequently the analyst must rely on input information and make strong assumptions about the transformation of inputs (and cost) into outputs. To model the long-run pattern of wages in the service sector, it may be sufficient to look primarily at relative wages and long-term demand factors such as income and population. A number of professions in the service sector have been successfully modeled using the familiar cobweb formulation. For example, Hansen et al. report the results of estimating a multiequation model of the long-run supply and demand for economists generally and conclude, among other things, that the real salary of new Ph.D.s will fall throughout this decade. Short-run analysis of academic wages usually focuses on various sorts of earnings functions in which the natural log of earnings is regressed against a variety of human capital variables. There is an extensive literature on the determinants of general economists' salaries and on the determinants of salaries for agricultural economists. (On salary determinants, see, for example, Boddy; Hansen, Weisbrod, and Strauss; Strauss; Tolles and Melichar; and Tuckman, Gapinski, and Hagemann among others, which have examined various aspects of the general market for economists. For agricultural economists' salaries, see, for example, Broder and Ziemer 1980, 1982; Fuller; Helmberger; Lane; Lee; Lundeen and Clausen; Melichar; Peck and Babb; Schotzko; Schrimper; Ziemer, Broder, and Spurlock; and Redman.) The more recent literature has emphasized the importance of using actual productivity measures, such as publications, in explaining variations in earnings along with human capital variables. A deficiency in some of this second type of research involves the absence of a welldefined theoretical justification for particular statistical specifications and the reliance on single-equation models. The objective of this study is to take advantage of a new, relatively underutilized data source on agricultural economists in order to examine the general characteristics of agricultural economists and to examine the determinants of their salaries in the early 1980s. In particular, we examine the 1981 Registry of Agricultural Economists maintained by the American Agricultural Economics Association and the Illinois Department of Labor. The registry, when examined in conjunction with Melichar and unpublished 1976 tabulations of the association's membership list indicate that it is broadly representative of the profession. The plan of the paper is as follows. The next section describes the data base and provides some general characteristics of agricultural economists in the early 1980s. Then we examine salary patterns of agricultural economists in various types of employment and focus in more detail on the salaries of academicians, especially those who are from and at educational institutions with doctoral programs which have been ranked in terms of the quality of their faculty and in terms of the quality of their graduate programs. Special attention is paid to the salaries of female agricultural economists and differences in salaries attributable to the race/ethnicity of agricultural economists. We conclude with a prospectus on outstanding research issues. Robert P. Strauss is a professor of economics and public policy, School of Urban and Public Affairs, Carnegie-Mellon University; Michael J. Tarr is a student at Cornell University. The authors wish to express their gratitude to the AAEA and Dr. Emanuel Melichar for making unpublished data available for this study, and to Farm Foundation for financial support. Responsibility for the views and any errors in this paper rests solely with the authors.