Market wage premium and publications of tenured faculty at Universidad de Costa Rica

Introduction Current Costa Rican policies on wage erosion for the public sector threaten to weaken the services provided including those related to research in academia. Objective The paper analyses the association between alternative wages and wage premiums with the number of publications by academic staff. Methodology This paper uses administrative data on the academic publications of tenured faculty at Universidad de Costa Rica to examine, using a Tobit regression analysis, the existing relationship between academic output and the opportunity cost that different people face in the labour market. Opportunity costs are imputed from wage equations estimated from the National Household Surveys. Results The findings indicate sizable differences in the wage premiums associated with the disciplines of study in the Costa Rican labour market: while physical education or nursing receive a wage penalty, careers in law or medicine report wages that are 40% above the average wage of other graduates. This higher labour market premium correlates with fewer academic publications, which suggests that people might respond to these higher opportunity costs by prioritizing alternative work opportunities. The results also confirm that the time it takes to get tenure is negatively associated with the number of publications. Conclusions Results highlight the potential for improving the institutional hiring policies by facilitating research activities for non-tenured faculty as well as the potential weakening of research activities due to the wage erosion policies.