Education Composition and Growth: A Pooled Mean Group Analysis of OECD Countries

This paper uses the pooled mean group (PMG) estimator and a dataset restricted to OECD countries to examine the relationship between different levels of education, i.e. between education composition and growth. The PMG estimator allows a greater degree of parameter heterogeneity than the usual estimator procedures used in empirical growth studies by imposing common long run relationships across countries while allowing for heterogeneity in the short run responses and intercepts. Results point to a significant longterm relationship not only between higher education and growth but also between lower schooling levels and growth. This indicates that public spending on education in OECD countries should be spread across the different levels of education in a balanced way.Levels of education, Economic growth, Dynamic heterogeneous panels.

Labor demand, productivity and business cycle: evidence from Portuguese large firms

What determines the cyclical behaviour of labor productivity? This article considers intra firm and inter firm explanations for the correlation between labor productivity and aggregate shocks. From a set of 2100 Portuguese firms with more than 100 workers, between 1995 and 1999, we found that: (1) aggregate labor productivity was procyclical, although more than half of the firms revealed countercyclical productivity; (2) procyclical intra firm effects were stronger than countercyclical inter firm dynamics; (3) both intra and inter firm theories are important to understand the dynamics of labor productivity; (4) cleansing effects dominated over sullying effects; (5) only a framework integrating several intra firm theories can explain the observed evidence

Job quality

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Measuring scientific performance without ties: is scientific leadership the solution?

For many decisions in science, evaluators have to select, assess, and rank authors based on their scientific achievements. However, the most diffused scientific performance bibliometric metric – the h index – produces many ties, precluding its use to define a full ranking of the authors. In turn, recently, Jorge Hirsch1 proposes the ℎɑ index (which measures the number of papers of the h core in which the author was the scientific leader)and the associated rɑ index(percentage of papers belonging to the h core in which the author was leader)to capture the concept of scientific leadership. We suggest using this last measure to break the ties of the h index. The method is extremely simple and provides a complete solution to this critical problem of the h index. To that end, we develop a two steps procedure, which is able to produce a more granulated ranking of the authors.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Human capital and entrepreneurship: The Jack of all trades hypothesis

We discuss the seminal contribution proposed by Lazear (2004, 2005) – the jack of all trades hypothesis. The basic idea of this approach is that a balanced set of (managerial) skills promotes entrepreneurship entry. When the skills are unbalanced, the individual will opt to become specialist.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Bridging into the future through education

One of the major bottlenecks of the Portuguese labor market is the level of educational attainment of the population. Despite considerable evolution over the last decades, the country is still behind the European Union average in most education indicators. In 2009, 69.2% of the population aged between 15 and 64 had less than upper secondary education, a value that is more than double the European average. Due to the measures and reforms that have been introduced, in 2019, this proportion had dropped to 47.6%. Between 2009 and 2019, self-employed persons had education levels below the average of the working population. In 2009, 79.0% had less than upper secondary education, and in 2019, this number was still at 50.6%. The human capital of the self-employed persons has significant consequences on their entrepreneurial activities. The low educational attainment level of the population has demanded extensive reforms. This chapter discusses the main policies implemented to improve educational attainment and obtain a comprehensive overview of labor market and education indicators

The problem of credit in research evaluation – the case of Economics

The measurement of scientific performance is usually done giving the full credit of each paper to all its authors. Aiming to analyze the impact of the number of authors on the performance, we propose an adjustment to the h-index that is flexible enough to allow the consideration of distinct co-authorship weighting schemes. We then evaluate the publication performance of the members of the departments of economics of the top 10 world universities. Our results show that the number of authors per paper is rapidly increasing and that this dimension measurably affects the final ranking of authors even in a subject area where the average number of authors is lower than in physical and life sciences.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A flexible approach for measuring author-level publishing performance

We propose a framework to evaluate, in relative terms, author-level publishing performance. To that end we introduce the publishing performance index (PPI) and the publishing performance box (PPB), and discuss the associated publishing profiles. We illustrate our approach conducting an extensive empirical application covering 472 top economists and developing several robustness tests. Instead of using a pre-designed measure without lexibility to adjust to the circumstances of each specific case, our approach accommodates alternative evaluation criteria, as defined by the evaluators. Beyond this key characteristic, our approach has some other important advantages: (1) it is easy to apply; (2) it is sensitive to the full list of publications and citations; (3) it is able to include additional dimensions of scientific performance beyond papers and citations; (4) it is a high granularity measure, providing a complete ranking of the authors under analysis.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Publication performance without calculations: an analysis based on the p-index

In universities and other research institutions, critical decisions (e.g., hiring, promotions, awards, and research funds allocation) are supported by bibliometric measures. The present study contributes to the literature by proposing a measure of publication performance. Our index (p'-index) takes the p-index suggested by Prathap (2010a,b) as starting point. With a small adjustment in the p-index, we obtain a measure that does not require any form of calculations. We build a table (presented in this study as online appendix) showing the final performance scores for each combination of: (i) total number of papers and (ii) total number of citations. The evidence shows that this new metric is almost perfectly correlated with the p-index (0.999), meaning that we can reach the same conclusions without having to make calculations.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio