Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Using a model of information, de Fontenay et al. (2018) demonstrate universities and funding agencies will respond to the noisier signals of quality in larger teams. They will tilt more of the funding and salary pool towards senior incumbents with established reputation (the `safe bets') rather than junior scientists. We test this model using data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients. Using variation in team size by field, we show that fields with larger teams (as proxied by the number of names on an average paper) have worse career prospects. This variation in career prospects by field cannot be explained by changes in university enrollments by field.