Do Academic Salaries Decline with Seniority?

This article reexamines the negative seniority‐earnings relationship for academic economists. The empirical results show that the anomalous negative seniority effect found in earlier academic market studies holds in the absence of direct measures of research productivity. The negative effect, however, eventually disappears as more comprehensive measures of publishing, citations, and other productivity measures are included in the wage equation to control for the quantity and quality of faculty productivity. Faculty with greater seniority appear to be rewarded relatively less simply because many have been relatively less productive than their colleagues with less seniority at similar stages in their careers.