A "LHC Premium" for Early Career Researchers? Perceptions from within

TL;DR

This study explores how early career researchers at the LHC perceive their research experience influencing future salaries, finding a perceived salary premium of 5-12% linked to experiential learning and signaling effects.

Contribution

It introduces a framework linking LHC experience to salary expectations and provides empirical evidence of a perceived salary premium among early career researchers.

Findings

LHC experience positively correlates with salary expectations.

Researchers perceive a 5-12% salary premium due to LHC experience.

LHC experience acts as a valuable skill and a labor market signal.

Abstract

More than 36,000 students and post-docs will be involved in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) until 2025. Do they expect that their learning experience will have an impact on their professional future? By drawing from earlier salary expectations literature, this paper proposes a framework aiming at explaining the professional expectations of early career researchers (ECR) at the LHC. Results from different ordered logistic models suggest that experiential learning at LHC positively correlates with both current and former students' salary expectations. At least two not mutually exclusive explanations underlie such a relationship. First, the training at LHC gives early career researchers valuable expertise, which in turn affects salary expectations; secondly, respondents recognise that the LHC research experience per se may act as a signal in the labour market. Respondents put a price tag on their experience at LHC, a "salary premium" ranging from 5% to 12% in terms of future salaries compared with what they would have expected without such experience.