The Hog-Cycle of Law Professors

Christoph Engel and Hanjo Hamann ()
Additional contact information
Hanjo Hamann: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn

No 2012_08, Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

Abstract: The market for law professors fulfils the conditions for a hog cycle: in the short run, supply cannot be extended or limited; future law professors must be hired soon after they first present themselves, or leave the market; demand is inelastic. Using a comprehensive German dataset, we show that the number of market entries today is significantly negatively correlated with the number of market entries 8 years ago. This is quite precisely the time young scholars on average take to prepare for the market. To get this estimate, we detrend the data, and we control for the size of student cohorts when these candidates enter university. This control variable mediates the effect of birth cohorts when candidates are born, which themselves exhibit negative autocorrelation, with a lag of some 20 years. Using our statistical model, we make out of sample predictions for the German academic market in law until 2020.

Keywords: market for law professors; hog-cycle; time series; out of sample prediction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 D22 D84 D92 J22 J45 K00 K23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-for and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2012_08online.pdf (application/pdf)

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:mpg:wpaper:2012_08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marc Martin ().