Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/324328 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
MAGKS Joint Discussion Paper Series in Economics No. 16-2025
Publisher: 
Philipps-University Marburg, School of Business and Economics, Marburg
Abstract: 
Previous research has shown that a large fraction of tenured university faculty in the U.S. and other countries were trained at a small number of highly prestigious universities. The question remains whether this concentration is due to competitive advantages held by candidates from these universities, or whether it merely reflects the larger output of early-career researchers aspiring to faculty positions by these universities. To address this question, we analyze data covering the full population of doctoral graduates in Germany since the 1960s. Similar to studies of the U.S. system of higher education, we observe a strong concentration of professors trained at only a small number of universities, with the top five universities accounting for 17.9% of all appointed university professors. However, we find no evidence indicating that the prestige of the doctoral degree-granting university - proxied by its membership in alliances of top-tier traditional or technical universities, or alternatively by university founding year - systematically affects individuals' odds of being appointed to professorships. Despite increasing stratification tendencies within the German system of higher education, our results also do not indicate that the importance of the degree-granting university for the academic careers of its doctoral graduates has increased over the past 50 years. While doctoral graduates from traditional universities and top-tier technical universities appear to be more likely to secure faculty positions at universities of the same type, this pattern can be attributed to a large share of doctoral graduates returning to their degree-granting university after initial appointments elsewhere.
Subjects: 
Faculty appointment
university prestige
stratification
academic labor market
professorship
Germany
Habilitation
JEL: 
I24
J24
J40
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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