Nobel laureates in economics make their most important and creative contributionsbetween the ages of 29 and 38. The average creative age of Nobel economists is slightly belowthat of laureates in physics, and considerably younger than that of laureates in chemistry andmedicine/physiology. The...

A key aspect of generating new ideas is drawing from different elements of past knowledge and combining them into a new idea. In such a process, the diversity of ideas plays a central role. This paper examines the empirical question of how the internet affected the diversity of new research by...

Despite the social importance of awards, they have been largely disregarded by academic research in economics. This paper investigates whether a specific, yet important, award in economics, the John Bates Clark Medal, raises recipients' subsequent research activity and status compared to a...

A lecture to graduate students of the joint Economics Ph.D. program of the Department of Economics, University of Bergen, and the Norwegian School of Economics.

The field of theoretical and applied efficiency analysis is pursued both by economists and people from operational research and management science. Each group tends to cite a different paper as the seminal one. Recent availability of electronically accessible databases of journal articles makes...

Economic page turners like Freakonomics are well written and there is much to be learned from them - not only about economics, but also about writing techniques. Their authors know how to build up suspense, i.e., they make readers want to know what comes. An uncountable number of pages in books...

The measurement of academic output in Ireland is of growing interest in the context of the government's strategy to identify and support centres of research excellence and to encourage inter-institutional collaboration in both research and fourth- level education. This paper looks at research...