Abstract.
Coates and Humphreys (2000) found evidence that administrators affect enrollment supply and faculty demand using a panel of eleven public colleges and universities in Maryland, implying that institutions have enough market power to permit the preferences of administrators to influence these variables. We extend this framework to include political constraints on administrators’ behavior and add data from public higher education in Virginia. The results from these extensions are consistent with the earlier findings. However, we find that political considerations and differences in the governance of higher education in the two states have relatively little influence on enrollment supply and faculty demand decisions of university administrators.
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JEL Classification:
I21, I28
Paper prepared for the Research Conference “It’s Better to Rely on Well-designed Institutions Than on Well-behaved People” held at UCLA, May 18/19, 2001. We thank Bob Lowry for comments on an earlier draft of this paper and Nicole Myers and Ryan Mutter for able research assistance.
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Coates, D., Humphreys, B.R. & Vachris, M.A. More evidence that university administrators are utility maximizing bureaucrats. Economics of Governance 5, 77–101 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-003-0064-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-003-0064-4