Job mobility, peer effects, and research productivity in economics

Abstract

We analyse a comprehensive panel dataset of economists working at Austrian, German, and Swiss universities and investigate how job mobility and characteristics of other researchers working at the same university affect research productivity. On aggregate, we find no influence of these local research characteristics on the productivity of researchers, if we control for their unobserved characteristics. This finding indicates that with today's information, communication and travelling technologies knowledge spillovers are globally available rather than dependent on physical co-presence. However, we find some evidence that high-productivity researchers could be more likely to benefit from local research characteristics.