Does co-authorship lead to higher academic productivity?

In recent decades, co-authorship and policies aimed at inducing academic collaboration have increased simultaneously. Assuming that intellectual collaboration is exogenously determined, prior studies found a negative relationship between co-authorship and productivity. I examine a panel data on economists publishing from 1970 to 2011 to test the causal effect of intellectual collaboration on intellectual output. As characteristics of the individual and her opportunity set are endogenously related to both collaboration and productivity, I instrument the amount of co-authorship by the common research interest between an author and her potential co-authors. After controlling for endogenous co-authorship formation, unobservable heterogeneity and time varying factors, the effect of intellectual collaboration on individual performance becomes positive

Title length

We document strong and robust negative correlations between the length of the title of an economics article and different measures of scientific quality. Analyzing all articles published between 1970 and 2011 and referenced in EconLit, we find that articles with shorter titles tend to be published in better journals, to be more cited and to be more innovative. These correlations hold controlling for unobserved time-invariant and observed time-varying characteristics of teams of authors

Determinants of ins and outs of unemployment

We estimate the robust determinants of the inflow rate into and outflow rate from unemployment in a sample of OECD countries, using Bayesian model averaging approach to overcome model uncertainty. We find that the main determinant of outflows from unemployment is expenditure on passive labour market policies, while the main determinant of inflows into the unemployment is the duration of benefit entitlement

Financial development, real sector output, and economic growth

This paper evaluates the interdependence between financial development and real sector output and its effect on economic growth. Using a panel data of 101 developed and developing countries over the period 1970 to 2010, we show that the effect of financial development on economic growth depends on the growth of private credit relative to the real output growth. The findings also suggest that the effect of financial development on growth becomes negative, if there is a rapid growth in private credit not accompanied by a growth in real output. Our findings provide empirical evidence in support of the theories postulating the existence of the optimal level of financial development given by the characteristics of an economy

Dynamics of global business cycles interdependence

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the time-varying interdependence among the economic cycles of the major world economies during the post-Great Moderation period. We document a significant increase in the global business cycles interdependence occurred in the early 2000s. Such increase is mainly attributed to the emerging market economies, since their business cycles became more synchronized with the rest of the world around that time. Moreover, we find that the increase in global interdependence is highly related to decreasing differences in sectoral composition among countries

The world trade network and the environment

This papers analyses the role of the world trade network on the environment. We rely on methods developed for social network analysis to identify the most important countries in connecting trade between all the other countries in the world trade network. We then estimate how the network or indirect effects from trade affect the environmental quality of a country. As the trade networks are endogenously determined by trade and environmental conditions, we use as instrumental variables the growth in the population of trade partners and the growth in the population of trade partners' partners to exploit exogenous variation in the world trade network. Once we simultaneously estimate the environmental, trade, income and network equations using a three-stage least square procedure, we find that network effects harm the environmental quality of developed countries but improve the environment of developing countries

Gender & Collaboration

The fraction of women in economics has grown significantly over the last forty years. In spite of this, the differences in research output between men and women are large and persistent. These output differences are related to differences in the co-authorship networks of men and women: women have fewer collaborators, collaborate more often with the same co-authors, and a higher fraction of their co-authors are co-authors of each other. Moreover, women collaborate more and do so with more senior co-authors. Standard models of homophily and discrimination cannot account for these differences. We discuss how differences in risk aversion and an adverse environment for women can explain them

Social networks and research output

We study how knowledge about the social network of an individual researcher - as embodied in his coauthor relations - helps us in developing a more accurate prediction of his future productivity. We find that incorporating information about coauthor networks leads to a modest improvement in the accuracy of forecasts on individual output, over and above what we can predict based on the knowledge of past individual output. Second, we find that the informativeness of networks dissipates over the lifetime of a researcher's career. This suggests that the signalling content of the network is quantitatively more important than the flow of ideas

On the Influence of Top Journals

We study the evolution of the influence of journals over the period 1970-2017. In the early 1970's, a number of journals had similar influence, but by 1995, the `Top 5' journals ?? QJE, AER, RES, Econometrica, and JPE ?? had acquired a major lead. This dominance has remained more or less unchanged since 1995. To place these developments in a broader context, we also study trends in sociology. The trends there have gone the other way ?? the field journals rose in influence, relative to the Top General journals. A model of journals as platforms is developed to understand these trends across time and across disciplines

Bowling Together: Scientific Collaboration Networks of Demographers at European Population Conferences

Studies of collaborative networks of demographers are relatively scarce. Similar studies in other social sciences provide insight into scholarly trends of both the fields and characteristics of their successful scientists. Exploiting a unique database of metadata for papers presented at six European Population Conferences, this report explores factors explaining research collaboration among demographers. We find that (1) collaboration among demographers has increased over the past 10 years, however, among co-authored papers, collaboration across institutions remains relatively unchanged over the period, (2) papers based on core demographic subfields such as fertility, mortality, migration and data and methods are more likely to involve multiple authors and (3) multiple author teams that are all female are less likely to co-author with colleagues in different institutions. Potential explanations for these results are discussed alongside comparisons with similar studies of collaboration networks in other related social sciences