I strongly disagree. Many of our research are not related to the hot topics, such as cryptocurrency or fintech or whatever can attract eyeballs, but related to the understanding of fundamental financial economics theories. Our salary doesn't come from our good teaching or research related to what attracts students, otherwise by your logic we should get paid much less than adjuncts who have years of industry experience. Arguably they should be much better teacher than TT faculty, due to their industry experience, and also much more attractive to studentstotally agree. also, it is risky to go for FinTech since it may be just a bubble. if the market collapses, what to do with the working papers on FinTech? some senior faculties just want to try something new, and they put that risks on junior faculties, but they will not consider this during tenure review, if you cannot publish enough papers, you are screwed.
that's why if anyone in a search committee mentions FinTech or Big Data, I will just not consider that school, because it is very risky for AP.
You do not hear people who do real science say: it is too risky to study this new material or technique even though everyone is talking about their potentials; if it doesn’t work I would not publish enough papers and fail. Why? Because real value-adding research is a risky endeavor. Real scientists understand that results may be negative and accept the risk. Only in meaningless finance research we can have “safe” topics, and we can run hundreds of reg y x and pick the significant results to sell.
We demand higher salaries than adjuncts because we are either more skilled at producing these snake oils or have better connections to sell them. We demand higher salaries because the students select business schools by their rankings, which are in part determined by the amount of snake oils we can sell to top journals. Students do not pay 100K to go to a business school so that professors can conjure up more fundamental financial economics theories for them to learn.