A Bayesian look at American academic wages: From wage dispersion to wage compression

OECD countries have experienced a large increase in top wage inequality. Atkinson (2008) attributes this phenomena to the superstar theory leading to a Pareto tail in the wage distribution with a low Pareto coefficient. Do we observe a similar phenomena for academic wages? We examine wage formation in a public US university using for each academic rank a hybrid mixture formed by a lognormal distribution for regular wages and a Pareto distribution for top wages, using a Bayesian approach. The presence of superstars wages would imply a higher dispersion in the Pareto tail than in the lognormal body. We concluded that academic wages are formed in a different way than other top wages. There is an effort to propose competitive wages to some young Assistant Professors. But when climbing up the wage ladder, we found a phenomenon of wage compression which is just the contrary of a superstar phenomenon.