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A note on the relative productivity drivers of economists: a probit/logit approach for six European countries

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Abstract

We examine the drivers of research performance of 1431 economists from six European countries. Data from the Scopus database are collected. We compare the relative performance of economists from three northern European countries: Belgium, Denmark and Germany with three from the south: Greece, Italy and Portugal. Relative performance is measured as the deviation from the country average in both citations and papers. The dependent variables take the value of 1 if the productivity of the researcher is above the country average and 0 if it is below. Probit/logit analysis is employed and marginal effects are estimated to examine the significance of factors like the country of their PhD studies, gender and inbreeding at the national level. A US PhD or a German PhD affects negatively the relative productivity of German economists. Inbreeding at the national level (locally trained economists) reduces productivity among Greek, Italian and Portuguese economists. Gender is significant in the case of Denmark, Germany and Italy, but it does not affect productivity in Belgium, Greece and Portugal.

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Notes

  1. There is also a rich literature not discussed here that can be found in Hamermesh (2013). Lubrano et al (2003) provide a ranking of Economics departments in Europe and discuss the relevant methodology. 

  2. More on the data and their collection can be found in Katranidis et al. (2017).

  3. A variable that is of interest is also the tenured/no tenured researcher. This is discussed in Oster and Hamermesh (1998) among others. We leave this for future research and would like to thank a referee for raising this point.

  4. The analysis was carried out with deviations from the mean as well as deviations from the median. The results are qualitatively similar and are available upon request.

  5. The analysis was carried out for deviations form the median as well and the results are available upon request.

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Correspondence to Theodore Panagiotidis.

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Katranidis, S., Panagiotidis, T. & Zontanos, K. A note on the relative productivity drivers of economists: a probit/logit approach for six European countries. Econ Change Restruct 55, 2171–2178 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10644-021-09380-2

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