The simplest competitive labor market model asserts that if tenure is a desirable job characteristic for professors, they should be willing to pay for it by accepting lower salaries. Conversely, if an institution unilaterally reduces the probability that its assistant professors receive tenure,...

In academia, a subset of faculty has tenure, which allows its beneficiaries to retain their professorships without mandatory retirement and with only limited grounds for revocation. Proponents of tenure argue it protects intellectual freedom and encourages investment in human capital. Detractors...

The paper develops a model of academic tenure based on multi-tasking and screening. A professor has two tasks, researching and teaching. We assume that researching performance is easy to measure but teaching performance is immeasurable. Then Holmstrom and Milgrom's (1991) classical muli-task...

Modern universities sell (teach) knowledge of social and scientific advances. In carrying out their objective, universities have to address three related constraints: 1) the problem of specialization as knowledge expands, 2) research obsolescence, and 3) the informational asymmetries between a...