The original Lotka's Law refers to single scientist distribution, i.e. the frequency of authors Ai with i publications per author is a function of i: Ai=f(i). However, with increasing collaboration in science and in technology the study of the frequency of pairs or triples of co-authors is...

This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The usual endogeneity problems related to estimating peer effects are...

This paper studies the importance of politician's qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2,031 German municipalities for which we have collected information on municipal budgets as well as the election results and...

Disability Insurance (DI) programs have long been criticized by economists for apparent work disincentives. Some countries have recently modified their programs such that DI recipients are allowed to keep some of their benefits if they return to work, and other countries are considering similar...

Using the regression discontinuity design of close gubernatorial elections in the U.S., we identify a significant and positive impact of the social networks of corporate directors and politicians on firm value. Firms connected to elected governors increase their value by 3.89%. Political...

We compare single round vs runoff elections under plurality rule, allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under runoff elections, the number of political candidates is larger, but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy and hence policy volatility is smaller, because the...

The local linear estimator has become the standard in the regression discontinuity design literature, but we argue that it should not always dominate other local polynomial estimators in empirical studies. We show that the local linear estimator in the data generating processes (DGP’s) based...

How does measured performance at university affect labor market outcomes? We show that degree class - a coarse measure of student performance used in the UK - causally affects graduates' industry and hence expected wages. To control for unobserved ability, we employ a regression discontinuity...

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of program in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of...

<Para ID="Par2">I38, O17. </AbstractSection> Copyright Barbosa and Corseuil; licensee Springer. 2014