Academic Inbreeding and Research Productivity in Australian Law Schools

This study compares the research productivity of inbred and non-inbred faculty employed at Australian law schools. The sample consists of 429 academics, employed at 21 law schools. To measure research productivity we use both articles and pages published in top law journals, defined in six different ways, as well as total citations and two different citation indices. We report results including, and excluding, publications in the home law review. We find evidence that silver-corded faculty outperform other faculty on one of the measures of research productivity, once the endogeneity of academic seniority and grant history is addressed, but this finding is not robust across alternative measures of research productivity. We find that there is no statistically significant difference between the research productivity of inbred and non-inbred faculty. This finding is robust to a range of different ways of measuring research productivity and alternative econometric approaches, including using two-stage least squares to address the endogeneity of academic seniority and grant history.