  We introduce a new survey of professors at roughly 150 of the most
research-intensive institutions of higher education in the US. We document
seven new features of how research-active professors are compensated, how they
spend their time, and how they perceive their research pursuits: (1) there is
more inequality in earnings within fields than there is across fields; (2)
institutions, ranks, tasks, and sources of earnings can account for roughly
half of the total variation in earnings; (3) there is significant variation
across fields in the correlations between earnings and different kinds of
research output, but these account for a small amount of earnings variation;
(4) measuring professors' productivity in terms of output-per-year versus
output-per-research-hour can yield substantial differences; (5) professors'
beliefs about the riskiness of their research are best predicted by their
fundraising intensity, their risk-aversion in their personal lives, and the
degree to which their research involves generating new hypotheses; (6) older
and younger professors have very different research outputs and time
allocations, but their intended audiences are quite similar; (7) personal
risk-taking is highly predictive of professors' orientation towards applied,
commercially-relevant research.
