System governing boards fulfill roles as both regulators and protectors for their multiple constituent campuses. While centralized control provides many benefits to institutional members, such advantages are also be accompanied by limitations upon campuses to pursue expanded missions, fully compete, and spend according to individual rather than collective priorities. In this study, I leverage a natural experiment where one state “freed” six public universities by removing the oversight of a centralized board. Given a novel opportunity to assess how institutions respond to a new intra-state market characterized by deregulation and increased competition for students, faculty, and other scarce resources, I first focus on changes in three institutional expenditure areas closely tied to entrepreneurship, competition, and prestige-seeking: executive compensation, faculty salaries, and spending on research activities. After constructing a novel dataset with administrative records on compensation and public data on expenditures, I employ complementary difference-in-differences and synthetic control approaches which yield robust evidence suggesting that newly independent universities increased the salary of their president/chancellor by approximately 6.2% (or $19,000), increased the average full professor salary by 2.2% (nearly $2,000), and increased research expenditures by an average of 12% (or $2 million). These findings not only advance the nascent literature on how state governance structures influence institutional behaviors but also provide useful evidence for policymakers considering the intended (and potentially unintended) consequences of similar governance reorganizations.

系统管理委员会在其多个组成校园中扮演着监管者和保护者的角色。虽然集中控制为机构成员提供了许多好处，但这种优势也伴随着校园追求扩大使命、充分竞争和根据个人而不是集体优先事项支出的限制。在这项研究中，我利用了一个自然实验，即一个州通过取消中央委员会的监督“解放”了六所公立大学。鉴于评估机构如何应对以放松管制和对学生、教师和其他稀缺资源的竞争加剧为特征的新州内市场的新机会，我首先关注与创业、竞争和其他资源密切相关的三个机构支出领域的变化。威望：高管薪酬、教职员工工资和研究活动支出。在构建了一个包含薪酬行政记录和支出公共数据的新数据集后，我采用了互补的差异中的差异和综合控制方法，这些方法产生了强有力的证据，表明新独立的大学将其校长/校长的薪水提高了约 6.2%（或 19,000 美元），全教授的平均工资增加了 2.2%（近 2,000 美元），研究支出平均增加了 12%（或 200 万美元）。这些发现不仅推进了关于国家治理结构如何影响制度行为的新兴文献，而且还为决策者考虑类似治理重组的预期（和可能非预期）后果提供了有用的证据。