Tom Coupé

REVEALED PERFORMANCES: WORLDWIDE RANKINGS OF ECONOMISTS AND ECONOMICS DEPARTMENTS, 1990–2000

In this paper, I study the production of academic research by economics departments and economists. Worldwide rankings are provided based on both citations and publications. These rankings reveal a dominant position of the United States in the production of economics literature. Over time, however, the extent of this dominance is decreasing. (JEL: A10, A14) Copyright (c) 2003 The European Economic Association.

Science Is Golden: Academic R&D and University Patents

Many studies have shown indirect effects of academic research by linking academic research to firm patents. However, since the Bayh-Dole Act, universities are allowed to patent inventions that were funded by federal money and to retain the royalties that these patents generate. As a consequence, universities now are interested in protecting their ‘profitable’ discoveries, just like any commercial firm doing R&D. In this paper, we apply the econometric techniques traditionally used to estimate the patent production function of firms to data on the patents of American universities. We find that more money spent on academic research leads to more university patents, with elasticities that are similar to those found for commercial firms. In addition, we provide estimates of the effect of establishing a Technology Transfer Office on a universitys patent output.

Incentives, Sorting and Productivity along the Career: Evidence from a Sample of Top Economists

In this paper we study empirically the labor market of economists. We look at the mobility and promotion patterns of a sample of 1,000 top economists over thirty years and link it to their productivity and other personal characteristics. We find that the probability of promotion and of upward mobility is positively related to past production. However, the sensitivity of promotion and mobility to production diminishes with experience, indicating the presence of a learning process. We also find evidence that economists respond to incentives. They tend to exert more effort at the beginning of their career when dynamic incentives are important. This finding is robust to the introduction of tenure, which has an additional negative ex post impact on production. Our results indicate therefore that both promotions and tenure have an effect on the provision of incentives. Finally, we detect evidence of a sorting process, as the more productive individuals are allocated to the higher ranked universities. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

Incentives and Bonuses - The Case of the 2006 World Cup

This paper investigates the determinants and effects of bonus schemes used during the World Cup 2006. Copyright 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

Incentives in Economic Departments: Testing Tournaments?

Existing tests of tournament theory have recently been criticized for their failure to distinguish tournaments from other theories that have similar effects like standards and marginal productivity theory (Gibbs, 1994, 1996; Prendergast, 1999). In this paper, we propose a series of empirical tests that allow to make this distinction. We use a dataset of average wages by rank in US economic departments over the period 1977-1997 and link this information to individual production data to test whether wage gaps affect the productivity and cooperative behavior of economists and to control for marginal productivity theory. We find that the wage gap is increasing along the hierarchy, even when controlling for production by rank. Moreover, wages are more sensitive to productivity for higher ranks. We find some evidence that higher wage gaps lead to higher productivity but not that wage gaps depend on the number of contestants nor that they lead to less cooperation.

Suspicious Blood and Performance in Professional Cycling

In this note, the authors analyze whether the International Cycling Union’s “index of suspicion,” which reflects the extent to which a rider is suspected of using doping, correlates with performance during the 2010 Tour de France and the 1-year period before and after the 2010 Tour de France. Though our point estimates suggest a medium-sized performance improving effect of being suspected of doping, the index of suspicion can only explain a very small part of the variation in performance. This could be because the current doping practice in cycling has little effect on diverse rankings in these races.

The Charity of the Extremely Wealthy

In this paper, we compare the charitable behavior of billionaires who inherited their wealth to the charitable behavior of those billionaires who made their own wealth. Self-made billionaires are found to be more likely to sign the ‘Giving Pledge’ and more likely to be in the Million Dollar Gifts lists or the Philanthropy Top 50 list of big givers, even after controlling for many other variables that can affect charitable behavior. They also are found to give more conditional on giving. This finding, which is consistent with ‘mental accounting’ occurring even at extremely high stakes, means policy makers in many emerging markets with ‘new’ billionaires better quickly modernize their outdated charity laws.

Is Optimization an Opportunity? An Assessment of the Impact of Class Size and School Size on the Performance of Ukrainian Secondary Schools

Using a rich data set of almost the entire population of Ukrainian secondary schools, the authors estimate the effect of school size and class size on the performance of secondary schools on Ukraines External Independent Test. They find that larger schools tend to have somewhat better performance, both in terms of test scores and in terms of test participation. The size of this effect is relatively small, however, especially in rural areas for which the estimates are likely to be more clean estimates. Class size is found to be insignificant in most specifications and, if significant, of negligible size.

Academic Inbreeding in Ukraine

To the best of our knowledge, academic inbreeding has never been a focus of attention among either Ukrainian academics or policy-makers, so this chapter is the first attempt to discuss academic inbreeding in Ukraine. High levels of inbreeding (about 50 percent) in Ukrainian universities are caused both by a deeply rooted tradition of networking and by current day factors, such as unified salaries (i.e., little differentiation in salaries across universities), high corruption rates, and the dependence of university funding on the quantity of students rather than quality of education and research. We believe that academic inbreeding in Ukraine is not a problem in itself, rather, it is a consequence of deeper problems in the education system, namely, its high centralization and rigidity and low levels of competition between universities, students, and faculty members (as known from the economic theory, insufficient competition lowers both product quality and production efficiency). Besides, academic inbreeding is only a part of a larger phenomenon, which can be called the “preference for insiders.” Thus, to get a university job, the crucial thing is to be “recommended” by someone (e.g., by a current faculty member) to the people making hiring decisions. And studying at a university is just one of the ways to get to know a person who could provide such a “recommendation.”

Biases and Strategic Behaviour in Performance Evaluation: The Case of the FIFA's best soccer player award

In this paper, we study biases in performance evaluation by analyzing votes for the FIFA Ballon d’Or award for best soccer player, the most prestigious award in the sport. We find that ‘similarity’ biases are substantial, with jury members disproportionately voting for candidates from their own country, own national team, own continent, and own league team. Further, we show that the impact of these biases on the total number of votes a candidate receives is fairly limited and hence is likely to affect the outcome of this competition only on rare occasions where the difference in quality between the leading candidates is small. Finally, analyzing the incidence of ‘strategic voting’, we find jury members who vote for one leading candidate are more, rather than less, likely to also give points to his main competitor, as compared with neutral jury members. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of awards, elections and performance evaluation systems in general, and for the FIFA Ballon d’Or award in particular.