Field Distance and Quality in Economists’ Collaborations

Ali Onder, Sascha Schweitzer and Hakan Yilmazkuday
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Sascha Schweitzer: University of Bayreuth

No 2021-04, Working Papers in Economics & Finance from University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth Business School, Economics and Finance Subject Group

Abstract: We analyze economics PhDs’ collaborations in peer-reviewed journals from 1990 to 2014 and investigate such collaborations’ quality in relation to each co-author’s research quality, field and specialization. We find that a greater overlap between co-authors’ previous research fields is significantly related to a greater publication success of co-authors’ joint work and this is robust to alternative specifications. Co-authors that engage in a distant collaboration are significantly more likely to have a large research overlap, but this significance is lost when co-authors’ social networks are accounted for. High quality collaboration is more likely to emerge as a result of an interaction between specialists and generalists with overlapping fields of expertise. Regarding interactions across subfields of economics (interdisciplinarity), it is more likely conducted by co-authors who already have interdisciplinary portfolios, than by co-authors who are specialized or starred in different subfields.

Keywords: Collaboration; Distance; Team Formation; Research Productivity; Fields of Economics; Stratification; Specialization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 A14 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45
Date: 2021-05-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net and nep-sog
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pbs:ecofin:2021-04

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