This paper addresses three academic labor market issues; the declining salaries of faculty employed at public colleges and universities relative to their private institution counterparts, the growing dispersion of average faculty salaries across academic institutions within both the public and private sectors, and the impacts of the growing importance and costs of science on the academic labor market and universities.

Gary Fethke and Andrew Policano's book Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America's Public Universities paints a picture of a future for public research universities that is very different than what many people will want to see. Their message is that the financial and governance models under which public universities have operated have broken down and that new models are required. While I do not always agree with their prescriptions, I argue that private research universities face many of the same issues as their public counterparts and that this book deserves to be widely read by all people concerned with the future of American higher education. (JEL H75, I22, I23, I28)

Involving Undergraduates in Research To Encourage Them To Undertake Ph.D. Study in Economics by Ronald G. Ehrenberg. Published in volume 95, issue 2, pages 184-188 of American Economic Review, May 2005

Stephen Long and Russell Settle's (1977) empirical tests of the economic theory of religiosity presented by Corry Azzi and myself (1975) in this Journal tend to be less supportive of our theory than were our original results. As such, I welcome the opportunity to trot out some further replications and extensions that I have conducted and I leave it to the reader to judge the relative merits of the two new contributions.

[Excerpt] Although a government employer may be the only employer of a particular class of employees in an area (say firemen), it does not necessarily follow that the government agency possesses monopsony power, as current or potential employees can find employment in alternative occupations in the private sector. Moreover, a model is presented in this paper that indicates that the existence of persistent vacancy rates for a class of employees is compatible with there being a greater number of applicants than there are positions, at a wage rate that is predetermined either through a legislative process or collective bargaining. In particular, if applicants vary in quality, then under certain conditions a rational government employer will choose to employ fewer employees than his assumed predetermined authorized employment level. That is, the employer will choose an optimal equilibrium positive vacancy rate.

This paper presents the first systematic attempt by economists to analyze the determinants of individuals' participation in religious activities. A multiperiod utility-maximizing model of household behavior is developed which includes among its implications the shape of a household's life-cycle religious-participation profile and the division of religious participation between husband and wife. The theory is empirically tested using statewide church-membership data and survey data on individuals' frequency of church attendance. The paper concludes by discussing several extensions of the model which lead to additional potentially testable hypotheses.

Our paper simulates the likely effects of a comparable-worth wage-adjustment policy in the state and local sector on female employment in the sector. The simulation is based on estimates of within-occupation male/female substitution and across-occupation occupational employment substitution that we obtain using data from the 1980 Census of Population.