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

How Competitive Is “Competitive” Procurement in the Social Services?

The scholarship on contracting generally argues that markets for social services are weak and lacking in competition. Using data gathered from Florida’s largest social service agency, the Department of Children and Families, this article adds to the discussion by constructing a more rigorous measure of competition that accounts for the quality of bidding entities. The findings indicate that while the measures used in earlier studies align reasonably well with the raw number of initial responders to competitive solicitations, they tend to overestimate competition when the quality component is included in the analysis. That is, social service markets may be even weaker than previously reported. Furthermore, an examination of the relationship between competition and performance fails to find a significant association.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Economic Research).

pp. 210–48

Reforming the local public sector: economics and politics in privatization of water and solid waste

Several empirical studies have analyzed the factors that influence local privatization. We examine the influence of transaction costs and political factors on local governments' choices through new variables. We consider two relevant services accounting for different amounts of transaction costs: water and solid waste delivery. Our results show that privatization is less common for water, which has higher transaction costs. Furthermore, we find that municipalities with a conservative ruling party privatize more often regardless of the ideological orientation of the constituency. Finally, we find that intermunicipal cooperation may be a suitable organizational form for some municipalities.privatization, contracting-out, local governments,