The economics of religion is a relatively new field of research in economics. This survey serves two purposes – it is backward-looking in that it traces the historical and sociological origins of this field, and it is forward-looking in that it examines the insights and research themes that...

This chapter reviews the data and literature on gender, race and ethnicity differences in research funding in the United States and Europe. The gender gap in research funding has closed at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in the United States and substantially...

We exploit a rich administrative panel data-set for cohorts of Economics students at a UK university in order to identify causal effects of class absence on student performance. We utilise the panel properties of the data to control for unobserved heterogeneity across students and hence for...

Countries often spend billions on university research. There is growing interest in how to assess whether that money is well spent. Is there an objective way to assess the quality of a nation's world-leading science? I attempt to suggest a method, and illustrate it with modern data on economics....

How should the productivity of research universities be measured? This task is difficult but important. The recent Research Excellence Framework in the UK, which was based on peer review, suggests that there has been a marked improvement in UK academic research in economics and in many other...

Suppose an agency awards a fixed number of prizes to applicants in different categories such that the applicant-to-winner ratio is constant by category. It is demonstrated in a simple theoretical model that the number of awards in a category will typically be positively related to the degree of...

The balance between the right to privacy and the right to freedom of information is altered when scientific research comes into play, because of its inherent needs and societal function. This paper argues that, for research purposes, microdata should be characterised as a public good. The...

Science rests upon the reliability of peer review. This paper suggests a way to test for bias. It is able to avoid the fallacy - one seen in the popular press and the research literature - that to measure discrimination it is sufficient to study averages within two populations. The paper's...

In universities all over the world, hiring and promotion committees regularly hear the argument: "this is important work because it is about to appear in prestigious journal X". Moreover, those who allocate levels of research funding, such as in the multi-billion pound Research Assessment...

This examination of the role and potential for replication in economics points out the paucity of both pure replication checking on others' published papers using their data and scientific replication using data representing different populations in one's own work or in a Comment. Several...