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Empirical Economics

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01-09-2015

Age and complementarity in scientific collaboration

Author: Matthias Krapf

Published in: Empirical Economics | Issue 2/2015

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Abstract

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 authors. Complementarity is maximized if the age difference between the authors is about 10 years. Two theories are presented which may explain this finding. According to these models, older and younger researchers differ not only in their skill levels but also in the types of their skills and their interpersonal relationships.

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Co-authorship reduces publication uncertainty through diversification (Barnett et al. 1988) and leads to a higher quality of articles as measured by acceptance rates or citations (Laband 1987; Ursprung and Zimmer 2007).

For an overview, see e.g., Cacioppo and Berntson (2005) and Cacioppo et al. (2006).

Note that the relative sizes of \(\alpha \) and \(\beta \) do not affect \(\rho \). I set both, \(\alpha \) and \(\beta \), equal to one.

I account linearly for co-authorship for both, input and output variables, i.e., \(Y_{ij} = Y_i/n_i\), where \(n_i\) is the number of authors of article \(i\).

See Prat (2002) for the composition of teams. Griliches (1969) made a related argument for physical and human capital.

See, for instance, Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2004).

Boschini and Sjgren (2007), in contrast, find that women are more likely to work alone.

The gender differences in human capital are significant at a 5 % level of significance, those on article output \(y\) at the 10 % level of significance. Average output of the 1,273 articles authored by two men is 10.1798 with a standard deviation of 9.7706, and for the 24 articles authored by two women, the mean is 13.6980 with a standard deviation of 11.9885. This yields a t test statistic for the gender difference of the averages of 1.74.

Division by a linear term in years since the first article ignores that age-productivity profiles are quadratic (Oster and Hamermesh 1998; Rauber and Ursprung 2008).

This may be due to the age structure in the profession. If professors always collaborate with graduate students, the age difference will necessarily increase as they get older on average, even if they know about the optimal age difference.

In column (4), the dependent variable is equal to 1 if the respondent either checked that he and the co-author have ever applied for the same job or if he checked that he did not know.

7,700 of the 19,606 articles used in Table 1 were single-authored. 8,095, i.e., 68 %, of the remaining 11,906 co-authored articles had exactly two authors.

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Title: Age and complementarity in scientific collaboration
Author: Matthias Krapf
Publication date: 01-09-2015
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in: Empirical Economics / Issue 2/2015
Print ISSN: 0377-7332
Electronic ISSN: 1435-8921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-014-0885-8

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