Is it prestige or is it output? INCHER researchers analyze the driving force behind concentrated hiring patterns at universities

Research has shown that a large proportion of tenured faculty in the US and other countries were trained at a small number of highly prestigious universities. Is this concentration due to competitive advantages of applicants from these universities or does it reflect the greater output of young researchers applying for faculty positions at these universities? To investigate this question, the authors analyze data covering the entire population of doctoral graduates in Germany since the 1960s. Similar to studies of the US higher education system, they find a strong concentration of professors trained at only a few universities, with the five largest universities accounting for 17.9% of all appointed university professors. However, there is no evidence that the prestige of the university awarding the doctorate systematically influences the chances of being appointed to a professorship. Despite increasing stratification tendencies within the German higher education system, the results also do not indicate that the importance of the doctoral university for the academic careers of its graduates has increased over the last 50 years.

This paper can be downloaded from:
https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb02/research-groups/economics/macroeconomics/research/magks-joint-discussion-papers-in-economics