Unlike in other disciplines, research output in economics is commonly measured based on the disciplinary reputation of the journals in which an author has published. Here, I examine how much output measures based on journal reputation tell us about the academic interest and relevance of economic papers as measured by frequency of citation. Using data from the 2008 Handelsblatt ranking of economists in German speaking countries and interdisciplinary citation data from the Web of Science, I find that researcher scores based on journal reputation explain only about 30 percent of the variation (variance) in article citations. When the top 10 (20) percent of the researchers according to journal reputation scores are excluded, the percentage of explained variation in citation frequency drops to 8 (3) percent. Furthermore, using environmental economics journals as an example, I show that the traditional output measures strongly discourage applied and interdisciplinary economic research. The findings confirm that the traditional output measures provide incentives for narrow economic work even if that work is of interest to only few other researchers. Responsible hiring committees and funding institutions should take these problems seriously and re-consider existing standards in the evaluation of economic research.
Research output in economics is commonly measured based on the reputation of the journals in which an author has published. Using data from the 2010 Handelsblatt ranking of economists in German speaking countries and citation data from the Web of Science, we examine the relationship between reputation and citation frequency at the level of individual researchers. We find that the variation (variance) in individual researcher citations explains only a small fraction of the scores based on traditional measures of reputation. Our findings suggest that individual citation data are indispensable for a relevant measurement of individual research output and for providing more productive incentives in academic research.
Billions of dollars are now spent annually in the United States and Europe for spatially delineated environmental services such as agricultural landscape management and river restoration programs, yet little is known about the spatial distribution of the benefits from these policies. This paper develops a framework for recovering information on this question from the spatial pattern of votes cast for referenda on the provision of spatially delineated public goods. We specify a model linking voter support for environmental improvement to the distance at which such improvements are expected to occur. The empirical application is to a river restoration referendum in the Swiss canton of Bern. Our results indicate that the benefits from river restoration have a strong local component, sufficiently strong that voter approval would not occur if only canton-wide benefits were at stake. Surprisingly, support for river restoration is no greater, and in some specifications is actually lower, in locations where rivers are a prominent feature in the environment.
The relation between the intensity of competition and R&D investmenthas received a lot of attention, both in the theoretical and in the empirical literature. Nevertheless, no consensus on the sign of the effect of competition on innovation has emerged. This survey of the literature identifies sources of confusion in the theoretical debate. My discussion is mainly based on a unified model that simplifies the comparison of different results. This model is also applied to show which factors work in favor of a positive relation between competition and innovation.
