View article

It is becoming more and more difficult for PhD graduates to find a job corresponding to their qualifications. Stephan and Levin have shown that this situation weakens the implicit contract between PhD students (or post-doc) and the research team in which they are doing their research. This weakness of the implicit contract may slow down scientific production because of the lack of incentives for good students to participate in academic science production. The aim of this paper is to examine incentives for students to invest in a PhD and for PhD supervisors to hire PhD students. After a theoretical analysis, hypotheses are made. These are tested by means of a survey on 400 engineering science PhD students from the University of Grenoble (a medium-sized town in France, with a large academic community). Do students with a Master's degree have relevant information about the scientific community and scientific …