Late retirement, early careers, and the aging of U.S. science and engineering professors

Navid Ghaffarzadegan and Ran Xu

PLOS ONE, 2018, vol. 13, issue 12, 1-16

Abstract: Studies of rescuing early-career scientists often take narrow approaches and focus on PhD students or postdoc populations. In a multi-method systems approach, we examine the inter-relations between the two ends of the pipeline and ask: what are the effects of late retirement on aging and hiring in academia? With a simulation model, we postulate that the decline in the retirement rate in academia contributes to the aging pattern through two mechanisms: (a) direct effect: longer stay of established professors, and (b) indirect effect: a hiring decline in tenure-track positions. Late retirement explains more than half of the growth in average age and brings about 20% decline in hiring. We provide empirical evidence based on the natural experimental set-up of the removal of mandatory retirement in the 1990s.

Date: 2018
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0208411

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0208411

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