The role of early-career university prestige stratification on the future academic performance of scholars
Mario Gonzalez Sauri & Giulia Rossello
#2019-018
Prestige and mobility are important aspects of academic life that play a
critical role during early-career. After PhD graduation scholars have to
compete for positions in the labour market. Unfortunately, many of them
have few research products such that their inherent ability and skills
remain mostly unobserved for hiring committees. Institutional prestige
in this context is a key mechanism that signals the quality of
candidates, and many studies have shown that a "good" affiliation can
confer many opportunities for future career development. We know little,
however, about how changes of scholar's institutional prestige during
early-career relate to future academic performance. In this paper, we
use an algorithm to rank universities based on hiring networks in
Mexico. We distinguish three groups of scholars that move Up, Down or
Stay in the prestige hierarchy between PhD graduation and first job.
After controlling for individual characteristics by matching scholars
with equal training or the same first job institution, we find that
scholars hired by their existing faculty sustain higher performance over
their career in comparison to other groups. Interestingly, we find that
scholars that move up the hierarchy exhibit, on average, lower academic
performance than the other groups. We argue that the negative relation
between upward ranking mobility and performance is related to the
difficulties in changing research teams at an early-career stage and to
the so-called "big-fish-small-pond" effect. We observe a high
stratification of universities by prestige and a negative association
between mobility and performance that can hinder the flows of knowledge
throughout the science system.
Keywords: University Prestige, Academic Performance, Early Career,
Mobility, Faculty hiring network, Institutional Stratification, Scholars
Research Performance, University System, University Ranking Emerging
Countries, Matched Pair Analysis, PhD Job Market, Mexico
JEL Codes: D7, I2, J15, O3, Z13