Search Results
Working Paper
Collaboration in Bipartite Networks, with an Application to Coauthorship Networks
This paper studies the impact of collaboration on research output. First, we build a micro founded model for scientific knowledge production, where collaboration between researchers is represented by a bipartite network. The equilibrium of the game incorporates both the complementarity effect between collaborating researchers and the substitutability effect between concurrent projects of the same researcher. Next, we develop a Bayesian MCMC procedure to estimate the structural parameters, taking into account the endogenous matching of researchers and projects. Finally, we illustrate the ...
Working Paper
Paving the Road for Replications: Experimental Results from an Online Research Repository
Are users of a bibliographic database interested in learning about replications? Can we motivate them to learn? To answer these questions, we performed an experiment on a RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) website: Using randomized stratification, we allocated 324 replications and their corresponding original studies to clusters; we then drew from those clusters to select treatment and control groups. We added brightly colored tabs to the relevant webpages to alert visitors to the existence of a replication study or to the original study of a replication. We monitored traffic over three ...
Working Paper
Loan regulation and child labor in rural India
We study the impact of loan regulation in rural India on child labor with an overlapping-generations model of formal and informal lending, human capital accumulation, adverse selection, and differentiated risk types. Specifically, we build a model economy that replicates the current outcome with a loan rate cap and no lender discrimination by risk using a survey of rural lenders. Households borrow primarily from informal moneylenders and use child labor. Removing the rate cap and allowing lender discrimination markedly increases capital use, eliminates child labor, and improves welfare of all ...
Working Paper
Universal Basic Income versus Unemployment Insurance
In this paper we compare the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) with an universal basic income (UBI) system in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Both policies provide a safety net in the face of idiosyncratic shocks. While the unemployment insurance program should do a better job at protecting the unemployed, it suffers from moral hazard and substantial monitoring costs, which may threaten its usefulness. The universal basic income, which is simpler to manage and immune to moral hazard, may represent an interesting alternative in this context. We work within a ...
Journal Article
The Basel Accord and Financial Intermediation: The Impact of Policy
This article studies loan activity in a context where banks have to follow Basel Accord?type rules and find financing with the households.
Working Paper
Parenthood and productivity of highly skilled labor: evidence from the groves of academe
We examine the effect of pregnancy and parenthood on the research productivity of academic economists. Combining the survey responses of nearly 10,000 economists with their publication records as documented in their RePEc accounts, we do not find that motherhood is associated with low research productivity. Nor do we find a statistically significant unconditional effect of a first child on research productivity. Conditional difference-in-differences estimates, however, suggest that the effect of parenthood on research productivity is negative for unmarried women and positive for untenured ...
Working Paper
The Experience of the RePEc Plagiarism Committee in Economics
RePEc is an open bibliography project driven entirely by volunteers and without a budget. It was created to enhance the dissemination of research in economics by making it more accessible to authors, publishers, and readers: 1800 publishers participate in this initiative, and 44000 authors are registered. Some of those authors became frustrated when their work was plagiarized and no action was taken. Many have asked whether RePEc could take action. The RePEc Plagiarism Committee was created to respond to this request. Because RePEc has no enforcement power, it can only ?name and shame? ...
Journal Article
A Journal Ranking Based on Central Bank Citations
We present a ranking of journals geared toward measuring the policy relevance of research. We compute simple impact factors that count only citations made in central bank publications. Our baseline ranking focuses on the period 2014-2023 and examines all items published in the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database. This ranking confirms the high policy relevance of journals specializing in macro, monetary, and international economics. Also, the major general interest economic journals are represented reasonably well in this ranking. In contrast, the major finance journals fare ...
Working Paper
Superstar Economists: Coauthorship networks and research output
We study the impact of research collaborations in coauthorship networks on research output and how optimal funding can maximize it. Through the links in the collaboration network, researchers create spillovers not only to their direct coauthors but also to researchers indirectly linked to them. We characterize the equilibrium when agents collaborate in multiple and possibly overlapping projects. We bring our model to the data by analyzing the coauthorship network of economists registered in the RePEc Author Service. We rank the authors and research institutions according to their contribution ...
Working Paper
Academic rankings with RePEc
This document describes the data collection and use of data for the computation of rankings within RePEc (Research Papers in Economics). This encompasses the determination of impact factors for journals and working paper series, as well as the ranking of authors, institutions, and geographic regions. The various ranking methods are also compared, using a snapshot of the data.