Salary Growth Research Articles

Exploring Academic Salaries in a Comparative Context

In 2007, the Boston College Center for International Higher Education (CIHE) launched an exploratory project attempting to do just that— collecting and comparing salary data (in World Bank PPP dollars) from 15 countries and one territory. We looked at target countries' relative positions on the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Program for comparative analysis. In terms of salary progressions over the course of a career, our data show that faculty in wealthier, more developed countries tend to enjoy greater potential for salary growth with some exceptions. Comparing faculty salaries to average per capita–income estimates indicates that the academic profession pays well in many parts of the developing world. Given this simple reality, faculty salaries stand out as a subtle but important consideration in any national development conversation and in the race for international relevance.

Giving a Voice to Employees and Firm Behavior During Crises

We provide novel evidence on how the inclusion of employees in corporate decision making (i.e. codetermination) affects companies’ behavior and their responses to the 2008-2009 financial crisis. We study a model of Scandinavian codetermination where — differently from the well-known German model — employees of large and medium-sized firms have the right but not an obligation to elect a minority share of the supervisory board’s members from among the firm’s workers. We find that, apart for larger firms, the likelihood of observing employee directors is higher in firms operating outside the capital region, in more research-intensive and less capital-intensive firms. Comparing these firms with a matched group of companies without codetermination, we next observe that the former are more reluctant to large reductions in workforce, are less risky, and have somewhat slower employment growth. They are however no different from other firms in terms of investments, salary growth, and equity values. Although firms with employee directors showed stronger employment concerns during the 2008-2009 crisis, they did not experience a stronger fall in equity values. We show that this could be due to wage adjustments being made in these firms during the crisis, and their less risky pre-crisis behavior that probably rendered them less exposed to the shock. Finally, we find no association between dismissals during the crisis and the dual class ownership, as a proxy for long-term oriented owners, or gender board diversity. This suggests that the employment security ensured through codetermination cannot be entirely replicated by other governance mechanisms.

Russiaas Real Sector of Economy: Factors and Trends In January-September 2013

The results of January-September 2013 point to the continued trend in economic growth slowdown. Within the above period, the industrial production index amounted to 100.1% on January-September 2012, including that of manufacturing industry which was equal to 99.7%. The index of agricultural industry happened to be below the expected mid-year values and was at the level of 101.8% as compared to January-September 2012. In the building and investment complex, a slump intensified by quarters of the current year. In January-September 2013, investments in capital assets decreased by 1.9%, while in the Q3, by 1.2% on the respective period of the previous year. A dramatic slowdown of the dynamics of GDP takes place with preservation of the trend towards growth in wages and salaries which situation increases the risks of downfall of financial indices of economic activities.

Goal orientation, academic competences and early career success

Purpose – This paper aims to focus on early career success as determined by a combination of what young professionals learned at school (in terms of their grades and academic competences) and how this, together with their self-regulatory focus, influenced their early objective career success in terms of salary growth and subjective career success, in terms of career satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach – Using an online survey, 247 alumni from a major business school in The Netherlands participated. Findings – The results showed that, within this sample, a person's goal orientation was an important determinant of subjective and objective career success. A master orientation was more beneficial than a performance orientation. In addition, a high mastery or a high performance orientation buffered the potential negative influence of low levels of academic competence and grades on career satisfaction. Originality/value – The study showed the limited predictive value of grades and academic competences to predict early career success.

Beyond the playing field: the role of athletic participation in early career success

Purpose– This paper aims to examine how participation in varsity athletics during college affects career success in the first decade after graduation. The paper predicted that student-athletes would develop greater mentoring skills and emotional intelligence, leading to higher starting salaries as they enter the professional workforce and faster rates of salary growth as their careers progress.Design/methodology/approach– Cross-sectional nationwide survey study.Findings– The paper finds that former collegiate athletes score higher on measures of mentoring and emotional intelligence and have higher salaries through the first ten years of their careers than their non-athlete counterparts. The paper also finds that there are significant interaction effects for gender, such that male athletes score higher than male non-athletes on measures of mentoring and emotional intelligence, while female athletes score the same as non-athletes on these measures. Gender also impacted salary differences, such that at the start of their careers, female student-athletes enjoyed a significant salary boost relative to male athletes and both male and female non-athletes, but saw this advantage decrease within five years and disappear altogether by the time they had worked ten years.Originality/value– This study highlights the ways in which participation in collegiate sports affects student-athletes, and how these effects differ for men and women. These findings are worthy of continued investigation and should encourage scholars to question how activities beyond the classroom might affect students' preparation for life and careers after college.

From anchors to orientations: Towards a contemporary theory of career preferences

The way people make sense of their careers in the contemporary world can no longer be usefully captured by objective benchmarks of career success, such as salary growth and promotion. Commentators have highlighted the need to address subjective criteria reflecting idiosyncratic needs, values and goals underpinning people's career choices and behavior. Our paper contributes to this debate by discussing and empirically exploring the core features of a contemporary theory of career preferences. Taking Schein's influential work on career anchors as a point of departure we identify and explore a set of research questions among a sample of professional workers. Our findings suggest that orientations are partially shaped in the broad social and family context; that people can have primary and secondary orientations; that orientations are adaptable to people's work and life circumstances; and that career preferences are, to a large extent, context specific limiting generalizations across national and occupational cultures.

The Living Standard in Russia in 2012

In 2012, households’ real disposable income rose by 4.2% which situation points to the fact that the trend of zero growth in households’ income in 2011 was overcome. In January 2013, a decrease in households’ income was justified by a seasonal factor, so, one may expect stable growth in households’ real disposable cash income in this year in general. In 2012, growth in households’ real income was justified by growth both in wages and salaries and pensions. Growth in households’ income found expression in an insignificant increase in the income inequality index and decrease in poverty indices.

Factors in Managing Actuarial Assumptions for Pension Fair Value: Implications for IAS 19

Corporate managers make several discretionary assumptions (i.e., the rate of salary growth and assumed return rate of pension plan assets) in calculating the fair value of pension assets and value of pension liabilities. In this study, we examine the factors that can induce managers to increase (decrease) fair value of pension assets (liabilities) through pension assumptions. We use the Taiwan setting as a natural experiment because Taiwan is planning to adopt IFRS from 2013 on. The estimation of pension asset (liability) value is similar between Taiwan accounting standards (i.e., TFAS 18) and international accounting standards (IAS 19); however, fair value is only disclosed in the financial statements under TFAS 18, but is required to be recognized in the balance sheet under IAS 19. The findings under TFAS 18 can provide important implications for future adoption of IAS 19. Using two key inputs for pension pricing model, this study finds that companies are inclined to increase (decrease) the value of pension assets (liabilities) by rising (lowering) the assumed expected rate of asset returns (expected salary growth). The manipulation is more pronounced for firms with high distress risk and complex ownership structure. Prior studies find that once firms are required to recognize the fair value (i.e., adopting IAS 19) as opposed to disclose the information (i.e., TFAS 18), firms have higher incentives to manipulate the model inputs. This suggests that the regulator needs to specify the authoritative enforcement rules regarding fair value estimation, and provides more insights on firms with high distress risk and complex ownership structure.

Determinants of expected rate of return on pension assets: evidence from the UK

This study explores whether UK managers behaved opportunistically when determining the expected rate of return on pension assets (ERRs) during an extended period of major changes in pension accounting rules (1998–2002), and whether this behaviour changed with the transitional adoption of FRS 17. The empirical results support the contracting hypothesis that UK firms with tightening debt covenants inflated their reported ERRs over this period. The contracting cost incentive underlying reported ERRs appears to be stronger during the FRS 17 transitional adoption period, and ERRs were used jointly with salary growth rate to manage balance sheet leverage. One important implication of our findings is that the IASB's 2011 revision to IAS 19, Employee Benefits, which removed the flexibility that firms could exercise in selection of ERR assumptions, potentially improves the reliability of reported pension cost components.

Benefit Enhancement in Public Employee Defined Benefit Pension Plans: Evidence from Three Sources

This study examines the prevalence, costs, and deferred compensation levels associated with pension plan benefit enhancement provisions often referred to as pension padding or spiking. Due to the difficulty to obtain data, three diverse sources of evidence are used: (1) an examination of reports on pension benefit enhancement presented in the financial press; (2) a survey of managers of state and local public employee pension plans; and (3) an empirical evaluation of two unique datasets of retiree characteristics and salary histories. We find evidence of excessive costs in the financial press, prevalence of overtime inclusion and loose limits on salary growth in the survey, and excessive near-retirement salary growth in the retiree data sets. This evidence suggests a strong principal-agent conflict circumventing a primary advantage of defined benefit pension plans, the ability to retain personnel with low costs during the near retirement period.

Studying “Sponsored Goods” in Cultural Sector. Econometric Model of Baumol’s Disease

The paper presents the second part of the study of “sponsored goods” in the cultural sector. It describes economic activities of theaters, concert organizations and museums in three dimensional index space coordinate axes being the lag of labor productivity, faster growth of salaries and tickets prices in relation to the corresponding macroeconomic indices. The methodology of constructing such indexes and statistical data used for this purpose are described in the first article published under the title “Symptoms and consequences of Baumol’s cost disease in cultural sector: an econometric study of “sponsored goods”. The aim of the present article is to construct and analyse econometric model of cost disease based on statistical data on activities of Russian theaters, concert organizations and museums for the period of 1994-2010.

The Decline of Professional Football in Italy

There are three main critical areas in the Italian football industry. First, we find that the revenues of teams playing in Serie A are low and highly concentrated on TV rights, hence vulnerable to changing conditions in the mass media industry. Second, we document that there has been an exponential growth of players' salaries, which has been historically driving up the total costs up to unsustainable levels. The third problem relates to a lack of credibility of the competition, due to a long list of scandals and its potential effects on revenues. In particular, the 2006 investigation on match rigging, and the new episodes on betting scandals in 2009 and 2010, have depressed the total revenues of all teams not only of those directly involved in match fixing. There can also be second round effects via a deterioration of the quality of games, which may also reduce revenues of the clubs. Possible ways out of these problems are discussed in the last section.

Salary trends of selected occupations in the financial sectors: 2003-2011

The paper examines the salary trends and behaviour of 22 occupations in the three-digit NAICS sectors of finance, insurance, and real estate sectors from 2003 to 2011. Overall, the mean wages of the same occupations within each sector are statistically significant different from those across sectors over this period. However, the rate of salary changes in the different job categories can be quite diverse. For example, salaries in the insurance sector are more predictable than others. Salaries that are based heavily on commissions, such as those in the real estate sector, tend to fluctuate more with economic cycles. Interestingly, jobs in the investment industry consistently show the greatest gain during the decade. Finally, the largest salary growth in real dollars as well as in percentage is in the categories that are normally classified as management and the smallest changes are in those occupations that are typically classified as staff positions.

Policy Implications of Assessing the Impact of Community‐Based Education on Dental School Finances

Dental schools are hard pressed to find the resources to adequately fund their mission of education, research, and service. Over the years, schools have tried to make up for the loss in public funds by increasing student tuition, increasing enrollment, and reducing the growth in faculty and staff salaries and program costs. Unfortunately, these strategies have not solved the financial problems. Declining resources are threatening the future of dental education. Data presented in this report attempt to answer the following question: will community-based dental education restore the fiscal health of dental schools and provide students an equal or better education? By reducing the number of chairs per student and developing revenue-sharing relationships with community clinics, community-based dental education offers a realistic option for putting dental schools on a solid financial footing.

Public Pension Promises: How Big Are They and What Are They Worth?

ABSTRACTWe calculate the present value of state employee pension liabilities using discount rates that reflect the risk of the payments from a taxpayer perspective. If benefits have the same default and recovery characteristics as state general obligation debt, the national total of promised liabilities based on current salary and service is $3.20 trillion. If pensions have higher priority than state debt, the value of liabilities is much larger. Using zero‐coupon Treasury yields, which are default‐free but contain other priced risks, promised liabilities are $4.43 trillion. Liabilities are even larger under broader concepts that account for salary growth and future service.

A survival analysis of the impact of boundary crossings on managerial career advancement up to midcareer

Although managers and professionals still compete in a career tournament for advancement and pay, the career boundaries that they cross in order to compete have changed. Traditionally, such individuals came up through the ranks within the same company by specializing in one functional area and changing, as needed, the geographic location of work in order to advance their careers. However, in the current era of less constrained, boundary-crossing careers, they are more apt to cross several boundaries, including functional, organizational, geographic, and family, as they pursue career opportunities. Using survival analysis with data from the career histories of 760 managers and professionals who collectively made 3917 moves up to midcareer, we examined the impact of the rate of crossing each boundary on the subsequent likelihood of advancement. In addition, over this span of career, we examined the extent to which more rapid advancement contributed to the rate of growth in annual salary. Our findings suggest that crossing functional, organizational, and geographic boundaries more often significantly increased the likelihood of advancement, whereas the duration of family boundary crossings had a negative impact. Moreover, as expected, advancement had a long-term impact on salary growth.

The influence of perceived characteristics of management development programs on employee outcomes

AbstractEmployees' perceptions of Management Development (MD) programs is the topic of this study. The purpose is to examine the influence of three important perceived characteristics of MD programs on relevant MD outcomes. The MD characteristics are: availability of role models, perceived control, and understanding the MD program. Outcomes are: participation in development activities, MD and job satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, perceived benefits of development activities, average salary growth, innovative behavior, and critical opinion sharing. Data are collected from 453 MD participants of seven organizations in the Netherlands. Findings show that perceived control has a positive relationship with MD satisfaction and extrinsic and organizational benefits of development activities. Understanding the MD program positively influences MD satisfaction and extrinsic benefits. Availability of role models has a positive relationship with intrinsic and organizational benefits.

Trends in salaries of obstetrics-gynecology faculty, 2000-01 to 2008-09

We sought to determine whether downward trends in inflation-adjusted salaries (1989-99) continued for obstetrics and gynecology faculty. Data were gathered from the Faculty Salary Survey from the Association of American Medical Colleges for academic years 2001 through 2009. We compared median physician salaries adjusted for inflation according to rank and specialty. While faculty compensation increased by 24.8% (2.5% annually), change in salaries was comparable to the cumulative inflation rate (21.3%). Salaries were consistently highest among faculty in gynecologic oncology (P < .001), next highest among maternal-fetal medicine specialists (P < .001), and were not significantly different between general obstetrics-gynecology and reproductive-endocrinology-infertility. Inflation-adjusted growth of salaries in general obstetrics-gynecology was not significantly different from that in general internal medicine and pediatrics. Growth in salaries of physician faculty in obstetrics and gynecology increased from 2000-01 through 2008-09 with real purchasing power keeping pace with inflation.

When public‐sector salaries become public knowledge: Academic salaries and Ontario's Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act

Abstract: The effects of salary disclosure on public‐sector compensation have long been a source of controversy in political and academic circles. Some commentators suggest that because of political pressure and closer public scrutiny, salary disclosure is a good thing because it results in pay that is both lower than it would otherwise be and more sensitive to performance. On the other hand, disclosure raises serious privacy considerations and could also have an inflationary effect on salaries unless all elements in a causal chain linking public knowledge and lower pay are firmly in place. In this study, the authors examine the implications of Ontario's Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act with respect to university‐sector salaries. The main conclusions are that salary disclosure, in general, and in the academic sector in particular, has never fully accounted for proper comparability issues and has not been updated to reflect adjustments for inflation. The act also raises important questions of privacy that have not been fully addressed. Perhaps most notably, there is no evidence suggesting that salary disclosure has much of an influence in off‐setting other factors affecting salary growth.

Productivity Under Large Pay Increases: Evidence from Professional Baseball

The establishment of the free agency system in the 1970s resulted in large salary increases among professional baseball players. Historical data show that players have tended to perform better at early stages of their careers since free agency was introduced. Under the current salary bargaining system, players only become eligible for salary arbitration and free agency at predetermined points in their careers, resulting in sudden changes in salary growth rates at these points. Using data on official days of major league service, it is found that players with high expected salary growth perform better, consistent with efficiency wage theory.