I'm working on a new bibliometrics paper with Richard Tol. We are using Glenn Ellison's data set on economists at the top 50 U.S. economics departments as a testbed for our ideas. I had to compute the size of each year cohort for one of our calculations, and thought this graph of the number of economists at the 50 departments in each "academic age" year was interesting:
There isn't as sharp a post-tenure drop-off in numbers as you might expect, given the supposed strict tenure hurdle these departments impose. But as we can see the cohorts increase in size up to year 5, which might be explained by post-docs and other temporary appointments, or people even moving up the rankings after a few years at a lower ranked department. So, as a result, the tenure or out year would be spread over a few years too. On the other hand, as the data were collected in 2011, the Great Recession might also explain lower numbers for the first few years.
A post-retirement drop-off only really seems to occur after 39 years. The oldest person in the study by academic age was Arnold Harberger.
There isn't as sharp a post-tenure drop-off in numbers as you might expect, given the supposed strict tenure hurdle these departments impose. But as we can see the cohorts increase in size up to year 5, which might be explained by post-docs and other temporary appointments, or people even moving up the rankings after a few years at a lower ranked department. So, as a result, the tenure or out year would be spread over a few years too. On the other hand, as the data were collected in 2011, the Great Recession might also explain lower numbers for the first few years.
A post-retirement drop-off only really seems to occur after 39 years. The oldest person in the study by academic age was Arnold Harberger.
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