Monetary rewards and faculty behaviour: how economic incentives drive publish or perish

Higher education institutions are increasingly emulating research institutions and concentrate their financial rewards on research output (Melguizo/Strober 2007). We investigate whether faculty members strongly react to such financial rewards. We focus on monetary rewards originating from promotions. Based on economic theories we derive three hypotheses. We test them with data from 112 faculty member from the USA and 189 from Germany. Consistent with our hypotheses we find that faculty members strongly behave like economic theory suggests: they not only increase publications when monetary incentives are large but they also instantly cut them down as soon as monetary incentives are gone