Journalists and others have asked me whether the favourable RAE 2008 results for UK economics are believable. This is a fair question. It also opens up a broader and more important one: how can we design a bibliometric method to assess the quality (rather than merely quantity) of a nation’s...

We study the effect of a large set of department characteristics on individual publication records. We control for many individual time-varying characteristics, individual fixed-effects and reverse causality. Department characteristics have an explanatory power that can be as high as that of...

In the past two decades China leaped from bit player in global science and engineering (S&E) to become the world's largest source of S&E graduates and the second largest spender on R&D and second largest producer of scientific papers. As a latecomer to modern science and engineering, China...

Few adolescents in the developing world receive sufficient guidance to make crucial life decisions during the transition from secondary to postsecondary education and into the labor market. Consequently, a significant number of graduates regret the decisions they make. The excessive rigidity of...

The paper contributes to the debate on cumulative advantage effects in academic research by examining top performance in research and its persistence over time, using a panel dataset comprising the publications of biomedical and exact scientists at the KU Leuven in the period 1992-2001. We study...

En el presente artículo se propone un conjunto de variables para medir las capacidades de innovación tecnológica (CIT) de las Instituciones Universitarias (IU) colombianas, teniendo como referencia la gestión de la innovación y la relación con el sector productivo de estas instituciones....

I model research quality as the outcome of a CES production technology that uses human capital measured by publication records as inputs. Investigating a sample of scientific publications with two co-authors I show that the CES-complementarity parameter is a function of the age difference of the...

This paper analyzes the labor productivity of Swiss university departments between 1995 and 2007. Using a parametric input distance function we estimate and decompose the Malmquist productivity indexes in line with Fuentes et al. (2001) and Atkinson et al. (2003). By contrast to those studies,...

The role of education is crucial in process of economic development. Initially, investments in training and education produce the necessary technical workers. At higher levels of economic development, the formation of highly skilled technicians, engineers, and professionals are made through...