Ali Sina Önder

The Effects of Publication Lags on Life‐Cycle Research Productivity in Economics

We investigate how increases in publication delays have affected the life cycle of publications of recent Ph.D. graduates in economics. We construct a panel dataset of 14,271 individuals who were awarded Ph.D.s between 1986 and 2000 in U.S. and Canadian economics departments. For this population of scholars, we amass complete records of publications in peer‐reviewed journals listed in the JEL (a total of 368,672 observations). We find evidence of significantly diminished productivity in recent relative to earlier cohorts when productivity of an individual is measured by the number of AER‐equivalent publications. Diminished productivity is less evident when the number of AER‐equivalent pages is used instead. Our findings are consistent with earlier empirical findings of increasing editorial delays, decreasing acceptance rates at journals, and a trend toward longer manuscripts. This decline in productivity is evident in both graduates of top 30 and non‐top 30 ranked economics departments and may have important implications for what should constitute a tenurable record. We also find that the research rankings of top economics departments are a surprisingly poor predictor of the subsequent research rankings of their Ph.D.s graduates.

The first cut is the deepest: repeated interactions of coauthorship and academic productivity in Nobel laureate teams

Despite much in-depth investigation of factors influencing the coauthorship evolution in various scientific fields, our knowledge about how efficiency or creativity is linked to the longevity of collaborative relationships remains very limited. We explore what Nobel laureates’ coauthorship patterns reveal about the nature of scientific collaborations looking at the intensity and success of scientific collaborations across fields and across laureates’ collaborative lifecycles in physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine. We find that more collaboration with the same researcher is actually no better for advancing creativity: publications produced early in a sequence of repeated collaborations with a given coauthor tend to be published better and cited more than papers that come later in the collaboration with the same coauthor. Our results indicate that scientific collaboration involves conceptual complementarities that may erode over a sequence of repeated interactions.

Do Nobel laureates change their patterns of collaboration following prize reception

We investigate whether Nobel laureates’ collaborative activities undergo a negative change following prize reception by using publication records of 198 Nobel laureates and analyzing their coauthorship patterns before and after the Nobel Prize. The results overall indicate less collaboration with new coauthors post award than pre award. Nobel laureates are more loyal to collaborations that started before the Prize: looking at coauthorship drop-out rates, we find that these differ significantly between coauthorships that started before the Prize and coauthorships after the Prize. We also find that the greater the intensity of pre-award cooperation and the longer the period of pre-award collaboration, the higher the probability of staying in the coauthor network after the award, implying a higher loyalty to the Nobel laureate.

Is economics a house divided?Analysis of citation networks

We investigate divisions within the citation network in economics using citation data between 1990 and 2010. We consider all partitions of top institutions into two equal-sized clusters, and pick the one that minimizes cross-cluster citations. The strongest division is much stronger than could be expected to be found under idiosyncratic citation patterns, and is consistent with the reputed freshwater/saltwater division in macroeconomics. The division is stable over time, but varies across the fields of economics.

No Place like Home: Opinion Formation with Homophily and Implications for Policy Decisions

ABSTRACT We set up an opinion diffusion model with a local opinion leader, and using simulations we show the possibility of driving a significant wedge between the opinions of two groups that exhibit homophily although individuals are highly conformist. There exists an opinion gap between the group to which the opinion leader belongs and the other group. This opinion gap increases according to the relative size of the residence community. We show empirical traits related to our simulation: Employing Swiss national referenda data from 2008 to 2012, we show that members of parliament match referenda outcomes in their residence communities closer than they do in neighboring communities and that this wedge interacts significantly with the relative size of the residence community.

Handelsblatt Ranking and Journal Quality: A Cautionary Note

Abstract I provide a brief discussion of the Handelsblatt ranking by focusing on its journal quality weights. I summarize the methodology underlying journals’ prestige measure, which is derived from their citation networks, and discuss its strengths and shortcomings. Although I agree that Handelsblatt ranking provides a great service to the profession, that same profession needs to be rather careful not to overemphasize the journal quality weights.

Thirty-Five Years of Peer-Reviewed Publishing by North American Economics PhDs: Quantity, Quality, and Beyond

We provide a descriptive analysis of various qualities of peer-reviewed journal publications of graduates of North American economics PhD programs between 1980 and 2014. We find that the share of single-author papers diminishes over time, and while two-author papers are more common than three-author papers during 1980-1999, this switches after 2000. All-female and mixed-gender author teams publish significantly less compared with all-male author teams between 1980 and 1999, but we find no significant difference after 2000. While male authors are over-represented in micro and macroeconomics, female authors are over-represented in labor and development economics. Although the quality of outlets for most fields does not change much over years, labor economics and economic history are published significantly better after 2000.