Scholarships, Citations and Salaries: Economic Rewards in Economics

While substantial attention has been paid to the determinants of academics' earnings [5; 7; 8; 14; 15], this literature has by implication suggested that the mere fact of having spent more time in the profession, and the publication of more scholarly articles and books, are the major determinants of salary differences. Our purpose here is to introduce a new determinant-the "quality" of one's scholarly research, measured by the frequency of references to that work-as an additional, objective measure of productivity. We expect that this proxy for the extent of a scholar's influence on the work of other researchers is rewarded by the market. In addition to giving a more complete picture of the determination of salaries in academic labor markets, our approach should be useful in establishing a better framework for the evaluation of issues of discrimination in such markets than has been presented before [2; 9].