Using a data set of highly cited researchers in all fields of science, we show that the gap in scientific performance between Europe, especially continental Europe, and the USA is large. We model the number of highly cited researchers in a sample of countries as a function of physical and human...

Public systems of higher education have recently attempted to cut costs by providing financial incentives to institutions who reduce the diversity of their programs. We study the profit and welfare effects of reducing product diversity in higher education, against the background of a funding...

This paper investigates the citation impact of three large geographical areas -- the U.S., the European Union (EU), and the rest of the world (RW) -- at different aggregation levels. The difficulty is that 42% of the 3.6 million articles in our Thomson Scientific dataset are assigned to several...

This paper uses high- and low-impact citation indicators for the evaluation of the citation performance of research units at different aggregate levels. To solve the problem of the assignment of individual articles to multiple sub-fields, it follows a multiplicative strategy according to which...

In many datasets, articles are classified into sub-fields through the journals in which they have been published. The problem is that many journals are assigned to a single sub-field, but many others are assigned to several sub-fields. This paper discusses a multiplicative and a fractional...

This paper evaluates the European Paradox according to which Europe plays a leading world role in terms of scientific excellence, measured in terms of the number of publications, but lacks the entrepreneurial capacity of the U.S. to transform this excellent performance into innovation, growth,...

In this paper we investigate if there was a causal effect of changes in current and 'permanent' income on the health of East Germans in the years following reunification. Reunification was completely unanticipated and therefore can be seen as a providing some exogenous variation, which resulted...