U.S. and Them : The Geography of Academic Research
Using a database of 76,046 empirical economics papers published between 1985 and 2004 in the top 202 economics journals, the authors report two associations. First, per-capita research output on a given country increases with the country's per...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187283&siteName=WDS&entityID=000158349_20091210112013 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/4345 |
| Summary: | Using a database of 76,046 empirical
economics papers published between 1985 and 2004 in the top
202 economics journals, the authors report two associations.
First, per-capita research output on a given country
increases with the country's per capita gross domestic
product (GDP). Regressions controlling for data availability
and quality in the country, indicators of governance and the
use of English yield an estimated research-GDP elasticity of
0.37; surprisingly, the United States (US) is not an outlier
in the production of empirical research. Second, papers
written about the US are far more likely to be published in
the top five economics journals, even after the quality of
research has been partially controlled for through
fixed-effects for the authors' institutional
affiliations; the estimates suggest that papers on the US
are 2.6 percentage points more likely to be published in the
top-five journals. This is a large effect because only 1.5
percent of all papers written about countries other than the
US are published in the top-five journals. The authors
speculate about the interpretations of these facts, and
invite further analysis and additions to the public release
of the database that accompanies this paper. |
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