Faculty Early-Retirement Programs.

This paper formulates a demographic flow model that can be used to analyze the effects of university early-retirement policies on faculty appointment rates and rank and age distributions. In addition, it discusses a specific early-retirement plan designed to induce less productive older members of a faculty into voluntary withdrawal while offering significantly less encouragement to their more productive colleagues. The model is then used to examine the extent to which this plan is likely to achieve its intended results, namely an increase in the flow rate of new appointments, a reduction in the number of older faculty members in service, and a reduction in total personnel costs. Both short-run and equilibrium effects are analyzed with specific reference to the situation at Stanford University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]