Let the Sunshine in: An Analysis of the Placement and Pay of University Presidents and the Effects of Open Records Statutes

This paper examines how personal, institutional, and legal factors affect where college presidents are placed and how much they earn given their placements. We find that controlling for selection into institutional type is important, suggesting that presidents nonrandomly sort into institutions based on unobserved characteristics that also relate to wages. We also find evidence that state “sunshine” laws governing whether applicants’ names must be disclosed in searches are related to placements and wages. Presidents hired in states that exempt the names of all but finalists from disclosure are more likely to be placed in public research universities and less likely to be placed in private institutions. There is also evidence that presidents hired in open records states earn compensating differentials, but we are ultimately unable to distinguish this from a state-specific effect. We also find wage discounts for presidents hired at times with larger numbers of states with open records and with exemptions to disclosure for non-finalists. Thus, presidents and institutions appear to respond to market-wide incentives created by sunshine laws.