Time to Go? (Inter)National Mobility and Appointment Success of Young Academics

Abstract

We analyze whether and how young researchers’ (inter)national mobility affects their later appointment success. We use data on 330 researchers from business and economics in Germany, Austria and the German-speaking part of Switzerland and measure appointment success by (a) the time it takes a young researcher to get tenure and by (b) whether the researcher succeeded in getting tenure at a highly ranked institution. We find that international mobility is positively related to the likelihood of getting tenure at a highly ranked institution whereas pre-tenure national mobility is negatively related to both measures of appointment success. The latter effect stems from the period when post-doctoral pre-tenure national mobility was uncommon and created a negative stigma – an effect that vanishes after the introduction of Juniorprofessorships.