Your PhD Program Selectivity Matters For Your Publishing Chances

What is it about?

Researchers in Economics care a lot about publications in good journals. We look at the chance of a researcher to publish at one. Obviously, the researcher's ability should affect this factor, but surely for a competent enough researcher, this should not be a problem. We limit ourselves to the top 100 researchers, and we show that for them, that chance to publish depends highly on their Alma Matter, their university. This is important for two reasons. One is that, it seems, there are real reasons to go to a more competitive school, even if just to improve your chances of publishing your first research! Another is that, it seems, editors interpret scholars' graduating places as signals about researchers' ability. This creates all sorts of incentives for PhD programs, governments, and other stakeholders to contemplate policies about equality and equity, and we hope other scholars will pursue this line of research in the future.

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Photo by Christa Dodoo on Unsplash

Photo by Christa Dodoo on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The uniqueness of our research is that we focus on the best researchers - non-observable innate ability is hard to measure or proxy, especially when things you study, such as citation metrics, depend upon the environment you study. Instead of trying to proxy ability, we take the best researchers, for whom the ability is arguably so high that variations in it should not matter much. Even for these researchers, Nobel- and John Bates Clark prize receivers, their graduating institution matters. It must matter for other researchers too!

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