Ready to Fly the Nest? How Autonomy Provisions and Mobility Requirements Shape Researchers' Early Career Choices

The increasing reliance on postdoc positions has been a source of concern in many countries. At the same time, postdoctoral positions have increasingly become a necessary ticket of entry for tenured positions in academia, especially in STEM disciplines. We leverage rich and detailed population-level data to analyze the determinants of early-career choices of PhD graduates in Denmark within all fields. We analyze the effects of a systemic change of funding for postdoc positions away from individual postdoc grants towards (predominantly) embedded postdocs and (few) international mobility grants. We argue this is associated with a general loss of autonomy for researchers in junior positions and our findings suggest that the change may have contributed to recent trends in PhD graduates’ preference for industry over academia. On the contrary, we find no evidence of any significant "brain drain" abroad as a result of this change in postdoc funding regime.