This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The usual endogeneity problems related to estimating peer effects are...

Analysis of higher education quality has become a central issue in light of UK government policies to introduce variable fees and to encourage more and more young people to attend university. In this context, an important question is whether institutional quality is reflected in labour market...

A new way of constructing efficient semiparametric instrumental variable estimators is proposed. The method involves the combination of a large number of possibly inefficient estimators rather than combining the instruments into an optimal instrument function. The consistency and asymptotic...

Differences in promotion across genders are still prevalent in many occupations. Recent work based on experimental evidence indicates that women participate less in or exert lower effort during contests. We exploit the unique features of the promotion system for French academics to look at...

Using a new data set that allows us to analyze precisely the research output in all fields of science, we show that the gap in scientific performance between Europe, especially continental Europe, and Anglo-Saxon countries, especially the USA, is large. We measure research quality by the number...

The combination of spending cuts, efforts to protect the poorest from some of their effects, and ‘localised’ decision-making are leading to an increase in the numbers of means tests designed by lower level institutions. This paper examines a case study of the effects of this, looking at the...

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow-on innovation? This paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We...

This paper presents the first empirical analysis of programmes to fast-track ‘green’ patent applications in place in seven Intellectual Property offices around the world. We find that only a small share of green patent applications (between 1% and 20% depending on the patent office) request...

Strategic patenting is widely believed to raise the costs of innovating, especially in industries characterised by cumulative innovation. This paper studies the effects of strategic patenting on R&D, patenting and market value in the computer software industry. We focus on two key aspects:...