We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25 to 50 percent more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold increase in the...

We document economists’ opinions about what is worth knowing and ask (i) which research objectives economic research should embrace and (ii) which topics it should study. Almost 10,000 economic researchers from all fields and ranks of the profession participated in our global survey. Detailed...

Biographical information on a sample of renowned U.S. inventors is combined with information on the patents they received over their careers, and employed to highlight the implications of patent institutions for markets in inventions and for democratization. The United States deliberately...

We examine the research productivity of German academic economists over their life cycles. It turns out that the career-patterns of research productivity as measured by journal publications are characterized by marked cohort effects. Moreover, the life-cycles of younger German economists are...

Lionel Robbins contributions are often discussed in terms of two main aspects. First, the delineation of the scope of economics in terms of decision making conditional on scarcity. Second, a more methodological concern with respect to scientific neutrality and the possibility of meaningful...

Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and countries, and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. We argue that such rankings do not effectively measure research quality, which should be the essence of...

In this paper we ague that any meaningful bibliometric evaluation of researchers needs to take into account that research productivity follows distinct life cycles. Using an encompassing data set portraying the research behavior of German academic economists, we first show that research...

This paper introduces the probabilistic formulation of continuous-time economic models: forward stochastic differential equations (SDE) govern the dynamics of backward-looking variables, and backward SDEs capture that of forward-looking variables. Deep learning streamlines the search for the...

We study the relationship between outside options and workers’ motivation to exert effort. We evaluate changes in outside options arising from age and experience cutoffs in the Austrian unemployment insurance (UI) system, and use absenteeism as a proxy for worker effort. Results indicate that...

In standard promotion tournaments, contestants are ranked based on their output or productivity. We argue that workers’ career progression may also depend on their relative rankings in dimensions a priori unrelated to their job performance, such as visibility or in-person presence. Such...