To Be a Professor : Institutional Networks and Spatial Differences in Publishing

For many academics, obtaining a professorship is the main goal, but only a few will succeed. We provide insight into the appointment process through a literature review of four related areas and empirical analysis. We focus on a wide area of economic sciences over a 22-year period. Our dataset combines official data on the appointment process from the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports with manually collected data from the Web of Science database on the publishing performance of applicants. We measure the concentration of the market using the HHI index. Our results confirm the core-periphery theory and suggest low migration flows both among Czech institutions and internationally, which leads to high rates of inbreeding. We suggest several motivations for this home bias, including searching costs, information asymmetry, fear of the unknown, and pressure from management. Our approach can be easily transferred to other countries