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on Sociology of Economics |
| By: | Pedro Albarrán; Raquel Carrasco; Javier Ruiz-Castillo |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes a sample of economists from two sources: faculty members working in2007 in a selection of the 81 top Economics departments in the world, and Fellows of the Econometric Society active at that date but working elsewhere in other institutions. Productivity is measured in terms of a quality index that weights the publications of each individual in four journal equivalent classes. Consider the partition of any set into the following three groups: those who study and work in the same country (stayers), those who study the Ph.D. abroad but come back to the country where they obtained a first degree (brain circulation), and those who complete their education at home but move abroad after the Ph.D., plus those who leave their country to study the Ph.D. and remain abroad in 2007 (two different forms of brain drain). From the point of view of a country or a geographical area, there are three types of movers: brain circulation, brain drain,and migrants constituting a brain gain for the country or the geographical area in question. We investigate the following four issues. (1) and (2). Controlling for demographic and career variables,we study the productivity of movers versus stayers for the individuals working in 2007 in the U.S. or in the EU. (3) The potential deleterious effect of academic in breeding practices on researchers' productivity. (4) The existence of productivity differences among economists from different countries. |
| Date: | 2014–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:werepe:we1415&r=sog |
| By: | Raj Chetty; Emmanuel Saez; László Sándor |
| Abstract: | We evaluate policies to increase prosocial behavior using a field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a six week deadline to submit a referee report, a group with a four week deadline, a cash incentive group rewarded with $100 for meeting the four week deadline, and a social incentive group in which referees were told that their turnaround times would be publicly posted. We obtain four sets of results. First, shorter deadlines reduce the time referees take to submit reports substantially. Second, cash incentives significantly improve speed, especially in the week before the deadline. Cash payments do not crowd out intrinsic motivation: after the cash treatment ends, referees who received cash incentives are no slower than those in the 4 week deadline group. Third, social incentives have smaller but significant effects on review times and are especially effective among tenured professors, who are less sensitive to deadlines and cash incentives. Fourth, all the treatments have little or no effect on agreement rates, quality of reports, or review times at other journals. We conclude that small changes in journals’ policies could substantially expedite peer review at little cost. More generally, price incentives, nudges, and social pressure are effective and complementary methods of increasing prosocial behavior. |
| Date: | 2014–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:qsh:wpaper:176786&r=sog |
| By: | Pedro Albarrán; Raquel Carrasco; Javier Ruíz-Castillo |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes a sample of economists from two sources: faculty members workingin 2007 in a selection of the 81 top Economics departments in the world, and fellows of theEconometric Society active at that date but working elsewhere in other institutions. Productivity ismeasured in terms of a quality index that weights the publications of each individual in four journalequivalent classes. We identify three elites consisting of the 123, 332, and 908 most productiveresearchers in a total sample of 2,605 scholars that have published at least one article in theperiodical literature up to 2007. We investigate the following six questions. (1) The "funnelingeffect" from countries where elite members obtain their first degree, to countries where theyobtain a Ph.D. and, finally, to countries where they work in 2007. (2) The extent of the researchgap between the U.S. and the EU. (3) The clustering of elite members in a few top U.S. EconomicsDepartments in order to pursue their Ph.D. and to work in 2007. (4) The geographical distributionof the elite into the following three groups: those who study and work in the same country (stayers),those who study the Ph.D. abroad but come back to the country where they obtained a first degree(brain circulation), and those who complete their education at home but move abroad after thePh.D., plus those who leave their country to study the Ph.D. and remain abroad in 2007 (twodifferent forms of brain drain). The last two groups of economists taken together are referred to asmovers. (5) The characteristics of the elites in Economics with the elites in other scientificdisciplines and, especially, with the elites in Mathematics and Physics for which we havecomparable data. (6) Finally, we investigate questions 1 to 4 above for subsets of "young people",defined as the economists in our original samples that obtained a Ph.D. at most 25 years before2007. |
| Date: | 2014–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:werepe:we1414&r=sog |