Earning like a Prof: Academic rank wage premia in Ústí nad Labem, Czechia

The article attempts to estimate the size of the wage premia fetched by ranked academics on the academic market in Ústí nad Labem, Czechia. We employed a large (anonymized) data set of contracts and wages of employees of a medium-sized regional public university in Ústí nad Labem. We used OLS regression in various specifications to determine the wage premia of all educational levels (mainly full professors over associate professors/ docents and associate professors/docents over assistant professors/PhDs) while controlling for many attributes (of employees or contracts) possibly affecting wage levels. The local context regarding the topic of this article is discussed as well. The results generally confirm the intuition and show a clear pattern of increasing wages with levels and ranks. Focusing predominantly on the academic ranks, the monthly premium of associate professors (docents) over PhDs seems to be somewhere between 5 and 6 thousand CZK (185 and 220 EUR), and the premium of full professors over associate professors to an average of around 4 thousand CZK (150 EUR). The latter premium, however, exhibits systematic variation across different schools within the university: in some it is insignificant (around 0), while in others it is rather large and averages around 8 thousand CZK (300 EUR).