BERNT BRATSBERG, JAMES F. RAGAN and JOHN T. WARREN * We track faculty for 30 yr at five PhD-granting departments of economics. Two- thirds of faculty who take alternative employment move downward; less than one- quarter moves upward. We find a substantial penalty for seniority, even after richly controlling for faculty productivity, and the penalty is little changed when we allow wages and returns to seniority to differ by mobility status. Faculty who end up moving to better or comparable positions were penalized as severely for seniority while they were in our sample as faculty who stay. These results are incompatible with the raiding hypothesis. Faculty from top 10 programs are also punished for seniority but to a lesser degree than other faculty, which could reflect reduced monopsony power against such faculty if they are more marketable. All results persist when we control for prospective publications and allow lower returns for older publications. Match-quality bias has dissipated in the post- internet period, which may be the consequence of greater availability of information. (JEL J62, J44, J42) I. INTRODUCTION Economists have studied various aspects of faculty mobility. Research shows that turnover is greater among nonunion faculty (Rees 1994); female faculty average slightly more employers than male faculty (Barbezat and Hughes 2001; Ginther and Kahn 2004) 1 ; the responsiveness of turnover to relative pay diminishes with rank (Ehrenberg, Kasper, and Rees 1991); and research productivity enhances prospects for upward mobility (Ault, Rutman, and Stevenson 1979, 1982; Coupe `, Smeets, and Warzynski 2005). Still, questions remain unanswered: Where do faculty go when they leave a univer- sity? How does faculty turnover vary with time at a university? What percentage of faculty move upward and what percentage move down- ward because of tenure denials or the prospect of being turned down for tenure? The present article contributes to our understanding of these issues, but its primary objective was to use data on faculty mobility to provide insights on another issue: returns to academic seniority. The negative returns to seniority that many studies find are commonly attributed to one of two factors. 2 The first view is that negative returns reflect monopsony power on the part of universities. Faculty with high mobility costs acquire high seniority and, because they are unlikely to move, they are paid less than equally productive faculty that employers view as more likely to leave. A competing explanation is that highly productive faculty are ‘‘raided.’’ According to this story, returns to seniority *The authors havebenefitedfromthe commentsofRichard Edwards, Ronald Ehrenberg, Dan Hamermesh, Derek Neal, Oddbjørn Raaum, Kjetil Storesletten, Laura Ragan, Carol Tremblay, Vic Tremblay; seminar participants at Claremont Graduate University, Oregon State University, Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska, the University of Puerto Rico-Bayamo ´ n, the Frisch Centre, the Missouri Eco- nomics Conference; the co-editor; and two referees. We thank John Anderson, Dave Mandy, Craig MacPhee, Peter Mueser, Peter Orazem, Mike Podgursky, Jim Schmidt, and Joe Sicilian for assisting us in the collection of certain data. Part of the project was completed while Ragan was a visiting scholar at the Frisch Centre; he is grateful for the Centre’s support. Bratsberg: Senior Research Fellow, Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research, Gaustadalleen 21, 0349 Oslo, Norway. Phone +47 2295 8818, Fax +47 2295 8825, E-mail bernt.bratsberg@frisch.uio.no Ragan, Jr.: Professor, Department of Economics, Kansas State University, Waters Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506- 4001. Phone 785-532-4582, Fax 785-532-6919, E-mail jfrjr@ksu.edu Warren: Adjunct Professor, Department of Economics, Kansas State University, Waters Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506-4001. Phone 785-532-7357, Fax 785-532- 6919, E-mail jomega@ksu.edu 1. Related research shows that faculty turnover varies with gender composition of the department (Tolbert et al. 1995). 2. See Bratsberg, Ragan, and Warren (2003) for a review of this research. A more recent study is Moore, Newman, and Terrell (2007). 704 Economic Inquiry (ISSN 0095-2583) Online Early publication July 24, 2009 Vol. 48, No. 3, July 2010, 704–721  2009 Western Economic Association International doi:10.1111/j.1465-7295.2009.00220.x JR. DOES RAIDING EXPLAIN THE NEGATIVE RETURNS TO FACULTY SENIORITY?