Are Happiness and Productivity Lower among University Students with Newly-Divorced Parents? An Experimental Approach

We live in a high-divorce age. It is now common for university faculty to have students who are touched by a recent divorce. It is likely that parents themselves worry about effects on their children. Yet there has been almost no formal research into the important issue of how recent parental-divorce affects students at university. This paper designs such a study. In it, to avoid 'priming', we measure students' happiness with life before we inquire into their family background. We also measure student achievement in a randomized-trial productivity task. Our results seem both of scientific interest and of potential interest to parents. This study finds no evidence that students suffer after parental divorcelabor productivity, divorce, well-being, happiness, experimental economics

Scientific Productivity and Academic Promotion: A Study on French and Italian Physicists

The paper examines the determinants of scientific productivity (number of articles and journals’ impact factor) for a panel of about 3600 French and Italian academic physicists active in 2004-05. Endogeneity problems concerning promotion and productivity are addressed by specifying a generalized Tobit model, in which a selection probit equation accounts for the individual scientist’s probability of promotion to her present rank, and a productivity regression estimates the effects of age, gender, cohort of entry, and collaboration characteristics, conditional on the scientist’s rank. We find that the size and international nature of collaborative projects and co-authors’ past productivity have very significant impacts on current productivity, while age and gender, and past productivity are also influential determinants of both productivity and probability of promotion. Furthermore we show that the stop-and-go policies of recruitment and promotion, typical of the Italian and French centralized academic systems of governance, can leave significant long-lasting cohort effects on research productivity.

Identifying Age, Cohort and Period Effects in Scientific Research Productivity: Discussion and Illustration Using Simulated and Actual Data on French Physicists

The identification of age, cohort (vintage), and period (year) effects in a panel of individuals or other units is an old problem in the social sciences, but one that has not been much studied in the context of measuring researcher productivity. In the context of a semi-parametric model of productivity where these effects are assumed to enter in an additive manner, we present the conditions necessary to identify and test for the presence of the three effects. In particular we show that failure to specify precisely the conditions under which such a model is identified can lead to misleading conclusions about the productivity-age relationship. We illustrate our methods using data on the publications 1986-1997 by 465 French condensed matter physicists who were born between 1936 and 1960.

The effects of aging of scientists on their publication and citation patterns

The average age at which U.S. researchers get their first grant from NIH has increased from 34.3 in 1970, to 41.7 in 2004. These data raise the crucial question of the effects of aging on the scientific creativity and productivity of researchers. Those who worry about the aging of scientists usually believe that the younger they are the more creative and productive they will be. Using a large population of 13,680 university professors in Quebec, we show that, while scientific productivity rises sharply between 28 and 40, it increases at a slower pace between 41 and 50 and stabilizes afterward until retirement for the most active researchers. The average scientific impact per paper decreases linearly until 50-55 years old, but the average number of papers in highly cited journals and among highly cited papers rises continuously until retirement. Our results clearly show for the first time the natural history of the scientific productivity of scientists over their entire career and bring to light the fact that researchers over 55 still contribute significantly to the scientific community by producing high impact papers.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Age effects in scientific productivity. The case of the Italian National Research Council (CNR)

Age effects in scientific production are a consolidated stylised fact in the literature. At the level of scientist productivity declines with age following a predictable pattern. The problem of the impact of age structure on scientific productivity at the level of institutes is much less explored. The paper examines evidence from the Italian National Research Council. The path of hiring of junior researchers along the history of the institution is reconstructed. We find that age structure has a depressing effect on productivity and derive policy implications. The dynamics of growth of research institutes is introduced as a promising research field

Which firms want PhDs? The effect of the university-industry relationship on the PhD labour market

PhD graduates hold the highest education degree, are trained to conduct research and can be considered a key element in the creation, commercialization and diffusion of innovations. The impact of PhDs on innovation and economic development takes place through several channels such as the accumulation of scientific capital stock, the enhancement of technology transfers and the promotion of cooperation relationships in innovation processes. Although the placement of PhDs in industry provides a very important mechanism for transmitting knowledge from universities to firms, information about the characteristics of the firms that employ PhDs is very scarce. The goal of this paper is to improve understanding of the determinants of the demand for PhDs in the private sector. Three main potential determinants of the demand for PhDs are considered: cooperation between firms and universities, R&D activities of firms and several characteristics of firms, size, sector, productivity and age. The results from the econometric analysis show that cooperation between firms and universities encourages firms to recruit PhDs and point to the existence of accumulative effects in the hiring of PhD graduates.

Tracing Mobile Inventors – The Causality between Inventor Mobility and Inventor Productivity

This paper analyzes the causality between inventor productivity and inventor mobility. The results show that the level of education has no influence on inventor productivity. Making use of external sources of knowledge, on the contrary, has a significant effect on productivity. Finally, firm size has a positive impact on productivity. Firm size also influences inventor mobility, although negatively. Whereas existing research implicitly assumes causality to point in one direction, this study ex-ante allows for a simultaneous relationship. To deal with the expected endogeneity problem, instrumental variables techniques will be employed. Results show that mobile inventors are more than four times as productive as non-movers. Whereas mobility increases productivity, an increase in productivity decreases the number of moves

Gender Disparities in Science? Dropout, Productivity, Collaborations and Success of Male and Female Computer Scientists

Scientific collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from hiring to peer-review processes and grant applications. In this work, we investigate gender-specific differences in collaboration patterns of more than one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We explore how these patterns change over years and career ages and how they impact scientific success. Our results highlight that successful male and female scientists reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared to scientists in the same career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other scientists, seek innovations as brokers and establish longer-lasting and more repetitive collaborations. However, women are on average less likely to adapt the collaboration patterns that are related with success, more likely to embed into ego networks devoid of structural holes, and they exhibit stronger gender homophily as well as a consistently higher dropout rate than men in all career ages