Italian Doctorate Holders and Academic Career Progression in the Period 1986-2015

This paper describes the Italian Doctoral Holder and Academic Career (IDH-AC) database, which includes unique information on the population of doctoral graduates from Italian universities, in all disciplines, in the period from the first cycle of doctorates (1983-86) to 2006. Doctoral graduates who pursued an academic career in Italy were identified by matching with the list of academics active in Italian universities in the period 1990-2015. These original data allows us to shed light on several issues related to the Italian academic labour market, such as gender, inbreeding, mobility, hiring and promotion patterns. The paper i) describes the record linkage between two datasets and ii) presents an exploratory statistical analysis of academic employment outcomes for the population of researchers who were awarded a doctoral degree from an Italian university over a 20 year period.