New Facts and Data about Professors and Their Research

We introduce a new survey of professors at roughly 150 of the most research-intensive institutions of higher education in the US. We document seven new features of how research-active professors are compensated, how they spend their time, and how they perceive their research pursuits: (1) there is more inequality in earnings within fields than there is across fields; (2) institutions, ranks, tasks, and sources of earnings can account for roughly half of the total variation in earnings; (3) there is significant variation across fields in the correlations between earnings and different kinds of research output, but these account for a small amount of earnings variation; (4) measuring professors’ productivity in terms of output-per-year versus output-per-research-hour can yield substantial differences; (5) professors’ beliefs about the riskiness of their research are best predicted by their fundraising intensity, their risk-aversion in their personal lives, and the degree to which their research involves generating new hypotheses; (6) older and younger professors have very different research outputs and time allocations, but their intended audiences are quite similar; (7) personal risk-taking is highly predictive of professors’ orientation towards applied, commercially-relevant research.