Negative Returns to Seniority and Job Mobility across the Program Quality Distribution: Are Top Public PhD-Granting Programs Different?

We analyze a unique data set containing annual salary and detailed job and publication histories for a sample of 1,009 faculty members drawn from 53 public Ph.D.-granting economics departments. Empirical results suggest that all else equal: (1) statistically significant negative returns to seniority exist within lower-ranked but not top 15 programs; (2) more frequent movers observe statistically higher annual salaries in lower-ranked but not top 15 programs; and (3) for each level of seniority, faculty in top 15 programs are more likely to move at any point in the career than faculty in lower-ranked programs.