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Geographic mobility and research productivity in a selection of top world economics departments

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Abstract

In this paper, we study the spatial characteristics of a sample of 2605 highly productive economists, and a subsample of 332 economists with outstanding productivity. Individual productivity is measured in terms of a quality index that weights the number of publications up to 2007 in four journal classes. We analyze the following four issues. (1) The “funneling effect” towards the US and the clustering of scholars in the top US institutions. (2) The high degree of collective inbreeding in the training of elite members. (3) The partition of those born in a given country into brain drain (who work in a country different from their country of origin), brain circulation (who study and/or work abroad followed by a return to the home country), and stayers (whose entire academic career takes place in their country of origin). We also study the partition of the economists working in 2007 in a given geographical area into nationals (stayers plus brain circulation) and migrants (brain drained from other countries). (4) Finally, we estimate the research output in different geographical areas in two instances: when we classify researchers by the institution where they work in 2007, or by their country of origin.

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Notes

  1. In Carrasco and Ruiz-Castillo (2014) we studied the evolution of productivity inequality, and the extent of rank-reversals between the first eight years and the remainder of the academic career for several cohorts, while in Perianes-Rodriguez and Ruiz-Castillo (2015) we studied the within- and between-department variability in productivity distributions.

  2. For the economics of immigration, see Borjas (1999), and Stark (2005), and for a survey of four decades of economics research on the brain drain, see Doquier and Rapoport (2012). Since this literature refers to the migration of low or highly educated individuals from developing to developed countries, we appeal to it here by analogy.

  3. Drèze and Estevan (2007) provide an excellent survey for the academic economics profession as a whole concerning the funneling effect towards the U.S., the clustering effect in a few top U.S. institutions, and the extent of the research gap between the U.S. and the EU around the year 2000. However, they use different types of information, often of an aggregate type at the department level, which does not include data on individual productivity, the country of origin, the geographic mobility, or the age of individual researchers.

  4. Together with Hunter et al. (2009), on the elite brain drain see Zuckerman (1977), Stephan and Levin (2001), Laudel (2003, 2005), and Ali et al. (2007). On brain circulation, see inter alia Borjas and Bratsberg (1996), Velema (2012), and Khan and MacGarvie (2016). For the research gap in favor of the U.S., see Dosi et al. (2006), and Bauwens et al. (2008). For the importance of foreigners’ contribution to U.S. science, see inter alia section 2 in Doquier and Rapoport (2012), and chapter 8 in Stephan (2012).

  5. They are based on the mean rank over 11 different rankings, and the mean rank that would result when only taking the five, 25, and 50 best performing scholars, thereby (partially) correcting for the size-bias of the first (Tables 9 and 13 in Coupé 2003, respectively).

  6. Three additional rankings of a more limited coverage should be mentioned. Firstly, Winkler et al. (2014) classify 771 four-year colleges and universities distinguished by the Carnegie Foundation (1994) in the U.S. into several groups. All of the 30 members of the top group, and 22 out of the 25 members of the second group among those granting Ph.D.s belong to our list. Secondly, Amir and Knauff (2008) rank 58 economics departments worldwide in terms of graduate education in 2006. The first 36 institutions in this ranking are included in ours, while only eight institutions—five of them from the EU, one from the U.S., and two from the RW—of the remaining 22 are missing in our list. Finally, Van Bouwell and Veugelers (2012) compile a list of “top institutes” using three different rankings. All of the 11 super-top, 21 mid-top, and eight sub-top institutions in Canada, the U.S., and Europe listed in their Table I are also included in our list. Therefore, we conclude that our 81 institutions constitute a useful sample of the best economics departments in the world in 2007.

  7. One person—whose nationality was known—never obtained an undergraduate degree. At the same time, for people whose higher university degree is an M.A. (mainly older people working in the UK), academic age is counted from that date up to 2007. For the only scholar that never obtained a Ph.D. or an M.A., academic age is counted from the B.A. up to 2007. In the 29 cases where the only missing data is the date of obtaining a Ph.D., this piece of information was imputed taking into account the first published Working Paper or professional article.

  8. Classes A, B, and C consist of 5, 34, and 47 journals, while class D consists of any other journal. Class A includes the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Review of Economic Studies. By way of example, the following 12 journals are in class B: Economic Journal, Games and Economic Behavior, International Economic Review, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Finance, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Rand Journal of Economics, and Review of Economics and Statistics. See Appendix II in Albarrán et al. (2014) for further details concerning this construction, including the listing of all journals in classes B and C.

  9. Oster and Hammermesch (1998) use the Laband and Piette (1994) weights that, as in our case, imply large differences between journal classes. Rauber and Ursprung (2008) use the Combes and Linnemer (2003) weights that lie between unity for five top journals, 2/3 for sixteen journals, down to 1/12 for the lowest quality journals—a very different scheme from our own. Coupé et al. (2006) use the average of the rankings based on different weighting schemes computed in Coupé (2003). For a classification of different schemes in an elitist-egalitarian axis, see Ruiz-Castillo (2008). For the consequences of adopting an alternative weighting scheme to our own see below.

  10. In contrast, only 42.8% of European academic economists published at least once in EconLit during 1971–2000 (Combes and Linnemer 2003), while 122,889 researchers in Economics and Business published 0.25 articles per year during 2003–2011 (Ruiz-Castillo and Costas 2015).

  11. Interestingly, these figures are of the same order of magnitude as those found in Ruiz-Castillo and Costas (2015) who study the productivity of 17.2 million authors in 30 broad scientific fields with publications in the period 2003–2011.

  12. We attempted a similar exercise taking into account highly placed scholars in the RePEc ranking (https://ideas.repec.org/top/). Unfortunately, matching the two lists of last names by an automatic procedure proved impossible.

  13. To simplify matters, the ESF have been classified into three categories, namely, economic departments in the U.S. (13 people), Europe (15 people), and the RW (13 people). Thus, the original 2755 economists plus the 75 ESF are classified into 85 categories: the 81 economics departments, plus four types of institutions for the latter.

  14. We thank a referee for this suggestion.

  15. Nine of these departments also occupy the first nine positions in the Econphd ranking. The tenth, the University of Minnesota, ranked 29th in Econphd, has been selected among the top ten in this Section because of the high number of its Ph.D.s among the elite. It should be noted that these top ten departments coincide with the top ten in Amir and Knauff (2008).

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Acknowledgements

Albarrán acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad through Grants ECO2009-11165 and ECO2011-29751, and Carrasco and Ruiz-Castillo through Grants ECO2012-31358 and ECO2014-55953-P, respectively, as well as Grant MDM 2014-0431 to the Departamento de Economía at Universidad Carlos III. Fernando Gutierrez del Arroyo, Pedro Henrique Sant’Anna, and Ana Moreno’s work in the construction of the dataset is deeply appreciated. Two referee reports lead to a complete rewriting and a considerable improvement of the original version of the paper. All remaining shortcomings are the sole responsibility of the authors.

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  1. Departamento de Fundamentos del Análisis Económico, Universidad de Alicante, San Vicente del Raspeig, Spain

    Pedro Albarrán

  2. Departamento de Economía, Universidad Carlos III, Getafe, Spain

    Raquel Carrasco & Javier Ruiz-Castillo

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  1. Pedro Albarrán
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Correspondence to Javier Ruiz-Castillo.

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Albarrán, P., Carrasco, R. & Ruiz-Castillo, J. Geographic mobility and research productivity in a selection of top world economics departments. Scientometrics 111, 241–265 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2245-x

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