Academic Job Market Signaling

This paper applies the classic Spence (1973) signaling model to academic job market incentives. Researchers with heterogeneous skills use publications like a channel to signal their types to employers, and journals act as intermediaries for the message. I allow for a large class of objective functions for journals to show that, in the presence of competition and free entry, research pursued in any stable equilibria is independent of journals’ goals. The signaling mechanism prevails and allows researchers to separate efficiently. The role of job market incentives provides alternative lens to analyze the reliability crisis in science and it sheds light on the conflict between careerism and the social relevance of research.