« Cyclical productivity growth and the manufacturing sector | Main | High Canadian Dollar Damaging to Exporters. An (Unexpectedly) Rising One Moreso »
In 1991, two thirds of the articles in Econlit, a comprehensive index of academic economic research, were written by people based in North America. By 2006, that share had dropped by one third to 45 percent.
These numbers are taken from a recent working paper by Cardoso, Guimaraes and Zimmermann. Their evidence suggests that the relative decline in North American share has come about because of a substantial increase in the productivity of European economists, and also because of an increase in Asian publication rates:
At one level, the dominance of North American and European authors in Econlit is not surprising. Das, Do, Shaines and Srinivasan argue that the US is not an outlier in terms of the production of economic research. They find, as do studies of other fields, that variables such as overall per capita GDP, governance, and English-language usage largely explain publications per capita. The Asian gain is readily explained by that region's rapid economic growth. The more interesting question is: why did North America decline and Europe rise so much between 1991 and 2006?
There has been a cultural revolution in European universities. I use the term advisedly. During the Chinese cultural revolution, the leadership empowered the masses to overthrow entrenched interests, creating radical change. In the same way, the British research assessment exercise empowered young research-active academics, generating a new, publication-intensive culture. The German university system has been reformed to introduce competitive systems of research funding, undermining the power of the old guard. The Bologna process aims to create a pan-European educational system, with more mobility for students and faculty - and hence more inter-university competition.
This next figure from the Cardoso et al paper shows the rise of Europe another way. The countries on the far right of the diagram are those with high levels of published economics articles per million inhabitants in 1991 through 1995 - Israel, the US, and Canada. The countries at the top of the diagram are those with the highest publication rates in 2002 to 2006 - a set of northern European countries including Norway, Britain, Sweden, and Denmark. Of the top 1991-1995 achievers, only Israel has maintained its publication per capita rate. The USA has slipped slightly, but Canada has slipped the most.
Note: ISO country codes: AUT "“ Austria; AUS "“ Australia; BEL "“ Belgium; CAN "“ Canada; DNK "“ Denmark; FRA "“ France; DEU "“ Germany; ISR "“ Israel; ITA "“ Italy; JPN "“ Japan; NLD "“ The Netherlands; NOR "“ Norway; ESP "“ Spain; SWE "“ Sweden; CHE "“ Switzerland; GBR "“ United Kingdom; USA - USA. Source: Authors computations based on Econlit and SSCI
So what's with Canada, eh? I can think of any number of explanations: an aging professoriate, European competition in fields Canadians have tended to specialize in, the strength of incentives to publish, or just random variation. I don't, however, have evidence in support of any of these hypotheses.
What is more interesting is how increased research activity in Europe and Asia is changing the profession. I've written before about my own personal feeling that increased competition for available spaces in journals means that it is getting harder to publish. Hold-ups in the publication process hinder the dissemination of research, as well as the career progression of academics, and this is a problem.
One response to a greater flow of research is to establish more publication outlets. The American Economic Association has introduced four new American Economic Journals. Rumour has it that when one very prominent professor's graduate students were no longer able to get published in the Association's journals, it was decided that the time had come to start some new journals. Likewise, there has been discussion in the Canadian Economics Association about starting a new Canadian journal, but as yet nothing has come of it.
More journals solve one problem and create another: what policy makers call "take-up." In the 20 year period studied by Das et al, there were 76,046 empirical economics papers written, and publication rates have increased since then. How do the ideas get read, taken up, and incorporated into the policy debate? Perhaps that's the reason why one of the most popular sessions at this year's American Economics Association meetings was on popular economics (webcast for AEA members only here). With so much being published, the really cut-throat competition is for audiences: getting someone to read, listen and pay attention.
Increased research output also changes what it means to be in the 'top 5'. When there are 100 journals, the top five represents the top five percent. When rates of research output increase sufficiently to support, say, 400 journals, the top five represents the top 1.25 percent. The simultaneous expansion of both research production and publication outlets has several consequences.
First, what it takes to publish in the "top five" or "top 20" changes. Whereas at one point one had to be in, say, at the 95th percentile or above, now one has to be, say, at the 98th percentile or above. What looks like an unchanged standard has, in fact, become tougher to meet, with real implications for anyone going up for tenure.
Second, while it might be possible to identify the 90th percentile of research output with some objectivity, or even the 95th, deciding whether or not an article is objectively good enough to be in the top 99.5 or 99.9 percent is another matter. Both the papers discussed here find that US-based authors remain dominant in the top five journals. When it is hard to tell whether or not a paper is objectively good enough to be in a particular top five journal, referees and editors may rely upon the signal provided by the individual's institutional affiliation. Yet as European and Asian economists come to dominate the mid-ranked journals, how long will it be before LSE is as good a signal of quality as Chicago and the US dominance of the top five journals dissipates?
On the other hand, why worry? Economic research is a public good. Everyone else free rides, why shouldn't economists? Surely the optimal strategy is to let others do the hard work, and take advantage of their efforts?
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.
One additional channel that might be worth considering is the "brain drain" caused by Wall Street in the past two decades.
Is there an inverse correlation between the size of the financial sector (measured as a GDP proportional ratio) and the size of economics academia (economic publications per capita)?
If yes then that would support a view that the brain-drain to Wall Street is 'hiding' and 'inhibiting' useful economic research.
Prospective youngsters might be lured to Wall Street after just 1-2 good articles, and there they shut up: there they might be writing internal research articles or client advisories - but not something that results in peer review and an academic publication. Or they might be twiddling models to gain another +1% for the bank's prop trading line.
This might be a 'tragedy of the commons' kind of moment, the same which plagues the pharma industry: huge but isolated mega-corporations are each funding their own research departments - and are keeping the results secret and the researchers isolated.
The researchers themselves are paid pretty well so they are not complaining, but the general effect on society is very negative: instead of a common, shared pool of scientific talent everyone reinvents the wheel in their own microcosmos, and often poorly so.
Also note how patents are making this situation even worse: they are reward research done in secret and scientists not talking to others about their ideas - which is the anti-thesis of good science ...
The results are awful to human civilization: too big to fail banks that are not robust enough, and huge pharma companies that in the past 20 years have not produced a single drug against illnesses that kill tens of millions every year while having "invented" 10 different types of painkillers and are milking the patent monopoly protection racket for 17+ years ...
Can something be done against this harmful trend?
Did they leave out New Zealand? I get the impression sometimes that every second Kiwi is an economist.
One thing I forgot to mention is that the GDP proportional size of the financial industry of most European countries is smaller than that of the US so the 'brain drain' from academia into the financial sector is weaker.
(Maybe instead of pure 'size' of the financial industry a general population proportional headcount of the financial sector would be more accurate. For example in Ireland the financial industry is huge - but most of it is caused by shell companies avoiding US corporate taxes and the headcount itself is low so the brain-drain for economists is relatively low as well. (cheating corporate taxes does not employ economists, it employs accountants and lobbyists))
Nick, no NZ. Canada's percentage share of articles in incumbent journals went from 6.57 in 1991-5 to 4.79 in 2006, while our share of articles in top journals went from 5.96 to 2.86. For Australia the comparable numbers are a slight rise in articles in incumbent journals from 3.26 to 3.39 (so the fall in AUS in the Figure shown is mostly due to a rise in population rather than a fall in publications). Australia also had a slight fall in articles in top journals from 0.93 to 0.43. Oceania's share of articles in incumbent journals in 2006 was 3.52, so you can ballpark the NZ share from Oceania minus Austalia, (3.52 in 2006 less 3.39 in 2002-6) and then figure out how their populations compare. But you didn't really want to know, did you?
White Rabbit - could be, I hadn't thought of that explanation. At the same time, London is a huge financial center, and GBR's publication rates increased quite a bit during this time period.
White Rabbit - and finance doesn't explain the Canadian decline. Though it is true that real academic salaries declined in Canada throughout the 1980s and 1990s (see my research with Casey Warman and Chris Worswick) so there might have been some change in the average ability level of people entering the profession.
There's also been some increase in the % of women of the econ profession in both Canada and the US, which may or may not have had an effect on professors' allocation of effort between research, teaching and administration. On the other hand, I would have thought this data wouldn't be recent enough and the effects wouldn't be large enough to explain these trends.
Personally I would start out by looking for demographic explanations of the American decline - as professors age, their rate of publication slows. Remember that the US doesn't have a standard retirement age, and tenure + no standard retirement age is, in my own personal opinion, a deadly combination. Something else that's happened in the US is that there's been a shift towards more use of non-tenured, contract employees, and those employees aren't expected to allocate as much of their time and effort to research as tenured and tenure-track faculty.
"So what's with Canada, eh? I can think of any number of explanations: an aging professoriate"
I suspect this is it. When I was an undergrad at UWO in the mid 90s, it seemed that every professor I had was hired in the early 1970s and was roughly 60 years old. Actually other than Jeff Smith and Al Slivinski, I think they all were: Burgess, Laidler, Leith, Fried, Palmer, Whalley, Boyer and Ron Wintrobe.
Not sure if that was the experience at other schools, but that's what UWO was like in the mid 90s.
I have observed this phenomenon for some time. I attribute much of it to the improved availability of data through the Internet that allows replication of empirical studies originally based on U.S. data. An easy way to get published in a European journal is to take a classic American study and use European data to either confirm the original results or find interesting differences.
It would be nice to see Germany finally pulling its own weight in the economic literature. For too long, there's been a gaping hole in the economics literature where Germany should be. It would be nice to see that void replaced by some research.
This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.
Read Full Article »