Post-docs signal their ability to do science and teaching to get a tenure giving universities the possibility of separating highly talented agents from the low talented ones. However separating that means signalling effort for the highly talented becomes even more important in a two-dimensional...

Using a new panel dataset comprising publication and appointment data for 889 German academic economists over a quarter of a century, we confirm the familiar hypothesis that publications are important for professorial appointments, but find only a small negative effect of appointments on...