Human and social capital accumulation within research infrastructures: The case of CERN

Abstract

The contribution to human and social capital accumulation is one of the most important socio‐economic benefits of public investment in Research Infrastructures. Sure enough, these large scientific enterprises are exceptional incubators of human and social capital, especially for early‐career researchers who have the opportunity to gain new skills and expand their network of contacts in highly prestigious and challenging workplaces. This paper explores the contribution of spending a period of study and/or work at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN to the expected future lifelong salary of early‐career researchers. Previous studies are here extended by using three sources of data: primary data collected through a survey to CERN Alumni, a survey to team leaders who supervised early‐career researchers at CERN, and secondary data salary information. Findings show that an experience‐based learning process at CERN is instrumental in developing skills that are needed by the economy and reveal an expected salary premium between 5% and 11%. Such human capital effect seems more important than a pure networking and reputational effect.

Ex‐ante socio‐economic impact assessment for a social science research infrastructure: The case of EuroCohort

“…To supply a very rough estimate of the expected increase in the salaries of those PhD students due to their involvement in EuroCohort, it is possible to consider that Catalano et al. (2021a, b) estimate that performing research and acquiring skills at CERN could lead to a salary premium effect which can vary between 5% and 13% more than the normal return to education in the relevant field. Taking into account that EuroCohort will be a social science, non‐material RI, to err on the side of caution, we can halve the lower limit of this interval and assume that performing research and acquiring skills within the EuroCohort framework will lead to a salary premium of 2.5% more than the normal return to education.…”

“…This framework draws on the experience of a number of existing research infrastructures, including several that are directly relevant to EuroCohort (among them there were the ESS and the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA)). Moreover, there is a small but growing literature on the socio‐economic impact of research infrastructures (see, for instance, Kounduri et al., 2014; EC, 2019b; Catalano et al., 2021). In this paper, we take stock of these works in order to evaluate the ex‐ante socio‐economic impact of a social science RI such EuroCohort.…”