published as 'The Awarding of PhDs in the United States and Canada: War, the Draft, and Other Economic Determinants' in: Applied Economics, 2015, 47 (28), 2939 - 2958
This paper is concerned with the production of PhDs in the United States and Canada in the post-WW II period, overall and by gender and major discipline. The effects of the explanatory variables lagged six years are consistent with the model. Military conscription with educational exemptions and the Vietnam War increased male PhD production in the U.S., but have no effect for U.S. females or in Canada. Government expenditures on research and development enhanced PhD production, especially for males and in the physical sciences in the U.S. A higher rate of growth of non-farm productivity encouraged PhD production in the U.S., but not in Canada. The cyclical indicator, the adult male unemployment rate, has a weak positive effect for males in both the U.S. and Canada, suggesting that the negative effect of the opportunity cost of time was stronger than the positive wealth effect. Other variables the same, there has been an increase over time in PhD production for females, but there is no such trend for males. The result has been an increase over time in PhD production for both males and females, but the faster increase for females has narrowed the gender gap.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.