Government investment in university research results in greater output and impact. To better capture economic benefits stemming from university research, governments have developed funding programs specifically targeting university-industry collaboration. However, little is known about the...

We explore how socio-economic background shapes academia, collecting the largest dataset of U.S. academics’ backgrounds and research output. Individuals from poorer backgrounds have been severely underrepresented for seven decades, especially in humanities and elite universities. Father’s...

We analyse how state university competition to collect resources may affect both research and the quality of teaching. By considering a set-up where two state universities behave strategically, we model their interaction with potential students as a sequential noncooperative game. We show that...

In broad parts of the scientific community the position in publication performance rankings, based on journal quality ratings is seen as highly reputational for the scientist. This contribution provides evidence that, at least in economics, such publication performance measures can not always be...

An ongoing debate in the literature on efficiency of higher education institutions concerns the indicator for research output in the empirical analysis. While several studies chose to use the number of publications, others rely on the overall amount of research grants. The present study...

One of the core indicators in the field of scientometrics is the number of papers published by a unit within a given period. However, such indicators can only be assessed properly by considering the unit’s available resources. When evaluating the efficiency of institutions worldwide, the...

Strong forces lead to a withering of academia as it exists today. The major causal forces are the rankings mania, increased division of labor in research, intense publication pressure, academic fraud, dilution of the concept of "university" and inadequate organizational forms for modern...

Peer reviews and rankings today are the backbone of research governance, but recently came under scrutiny. They take explicitly or implicitly agency theory as a theoretical basis. The emerging psychological economics opens a new perspective. As scholarly research is a mainly curiosity driven...

We study what makes a research grant application successful in terms of ability, type of research, experience, and demographics of the applicants. But our main objective is to investigate whether public funding organizations support the teams that are most likely to undertake transformative or...

Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Between 1960 and 1990, 76 all-male US universities transitioned to coeducation. Using a generalized difference-in-differences design, we find that coeducation led to a 44% increase in gender-related research...