Geographic mobility and research productivity in a selection of top world economics departments

In this paper, we study the spatial characteristics of a sample of 2605 highly productive economists, and a subsample of 332 economists with outstanding productivity. Individual productivity is measured in terms of a quality index that weights the number of publications up to 2007 in four journal classes. We analyze the following four issues. (1) The "funneling effect" towards the US and the clustering of scholars in the top US institutions. (2) The high degree of collective inbreeding in the training of elite members. (3) The partition of those born in a given country into brain drain (who work in a country different from their country of origin), brain circulation (who study and/or work abroad followed by a return to the home country), and stayers (whose entire academic career takes place in their country of origin). We also study the partition of the economists working in 2007 in a given geographical area into nationals (stayers plus brain circulation) and migrants (brain drained from other countries). (4) Finally, we estimate the research output in different geographical areas in two instances: when we classify researchers by the institution where they work in 2007, or by their country of origin.Albarrán acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad through Grants ECO2009-11165 and ECO2011-29751, and Carrasco and Ruiz-Castillo through Grants ECO2012-31358 and ECO2014-55953-P, respectively, as well as Grant MDM 2014-0431 to the Departamento de Economıía at Universidad Carlos II

Spatial Mobility in Elite Academic Institutions in Economics : the Case of Spain

Using a dataset of 3,540 economists working in 2007 in 125 of the best academic centers in 22 countries, this paper presents some evidence on spatial mobility patterns in Spain and other countries conditional on some personal, department, and country characteristics. There are productivity and other reasons for designing a scientific policy with the aims of attracting foreign talent (brain gain), minimizing the elite brain drain, and recovering nationals who have earned a Ph.D. or have spent some time abroad (brain circulation). Our main result is that Spain has more brain gain, more brain circulation and less brain drain than comparable large, continental European countries, i.e. Germany, France, and Italy, where economists have similar opportunities for publishing their research in English or in their own languages. We suggest that these results can be mostly explained by the governance changes introduced in a number of Spanish institutions in 1975-1990 by a sizable contingent of Spanish economists coming back home after attending graduate school abroad. These initiatives were also favored by the availability of resources to finance certain research related activities, including international Ph.D. programs.This is the fourth version of a Working Paper in this series with the title “Governance, brain drain, and brain gain in elite academic institutions in economics. The case of Spain”, published in December 2017. Carrasco and Ruiz-Castillo acknowledge financial support from the Spanish MEC (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad) through grants No. ECO2015-65204-P and ECO2014-55953-P, respectively, as well as grants MDM 2014-0431 from the MEC, and MadEco-CM (S2015/HUM-3444) from the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid to their economics department