A revealed preference analysis of PhD students’ choices over employment outcomes

Annamaria Conti and Fabiana Visentin

Research Policy, 2015, vol. 44, issue 10, 1931-1947

Abstract: We develop a revealed preference approach to elicit science and engineering PhDs’ preferences over employment outcomes, exploiting cohort size variations. Depending on whether pecuniary and non-pecuniary rewards are sticky or not, increments in the PhDs’ cohort size decrease either the availability of their ideal employment categories or the related compensations. In both cases, the PhDs’ preferred employment categories are revealed to be the ones that are relatively less chosen when the PhDs’ cohort is large and relatively more so when it is small. Examining two major European universities, we find that PhDs equally value employment in highly-ranked universities and R&D-intensive companies. Moreover, these employment categories are preferred to low-ranked universities, non-R&D-intensive firms, and public administration. There is preference heterogeneity across PhDs depending on their research field.

Keywords: Revealed preferences; Employment choices; PhD students; Cohort size effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 I23 J2 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733315001067
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:44:y:2015:i:10:p:1931-1947

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2015.06.009

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().