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on Sociology of Economics |
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Issue of 2006‒11‒04
five papers chosen by Jonas Holmstrom Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration |
| By: | Han Kim, E; Morse, Adair; Zingales, Luigi |
| Abstract: | We compile the list of articles published in major refereed economics journals during the last 35 years that have received more than 500 citations. We document major shifts in the mode of contribution and in the importance of different sub-fields: Theory loses out to empirical work, and micro and macro give way to growth and development in the 1990s. While we do not witness any decline in the primacy of production in the United States over the period, the concentration of institutions within the U.S. hosting and training authors of the highly-cited articles has declined substantially. |
| Keywords: | citations; innovations in economics |
| JEL: | A11 B20 O33 |
| Date: | 2006–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:5873&r=sog |
| By: | Florian Hoffmann; Philip Oreopoulos |
| Abstract: | This paper uses a new administrative dataset of students at a large university matched to courses and instructors to analyze the importance of teacher quality at the postsecondary level. Instructors are matched to both objective and subjective characteristics of teacher quality to estimate the impact of rank, salary, and perceived effectiveness on grade, dropout and subject interest outcomes. Student fixed effects, time of day and week controls, and the fact that first year students have little information about instructors when choosing courses helps minimize selection biases. We also estimate each instructor's value added and the variance of these effects to determine the extent to which any teacher difference matters to short-term academic outcomes. The findings suggest that subjective teacher evaluations perform well in reflecting an instructor's influence on students while objective characteristics such as rank and salary do not. Whether an instructor teaches full-time or part-time, does research, has tenure, or is highly paid has no influence on a college student's grade, likelihood of dropping a course or taking more subsequent courses in the same subject. However, replacing one instructor with another ranked one standard deviation higher in perceived effectiveness increases average grades by 0.5 percentage points, decreases the likelihood of dropping a class by 1.3 percentage points and increases in the number of same-subject courses taken in second and third year by about 4 percent. The overall importance of instructor differences at the university level is smaller than that implied in earlier research at the elementary and secondary school level, but important outliers exist. |
| JEL: | H52 I2 |
| Date: | 2006–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12596&r=sog |
| By: | Francesco Lissoni (University of Brescia and CESPRI-Bocconi University,Italy.); Bulat Sanditov (CESPRI-Bocconi University, Italy and MERIT-Maastricht University, The Netherlands.); Gianluca Tarasconi (CESPRI-Bocconi University, Milan, Italy.) |
| Abstract: | The paper describes the methodogy used to build a database on academic inventors from France, Italy, and Sweden (1978-2004), which was delivered to the European Commission as part of the KEINS project (Knowledge-Based Entrepreneurship: Innovation, Networks and Systems), and will provide the basis for future publications. It provides an overview of the database contents, as well as information on access rules and on related datasets by CESPRI-Università Bocconi. The database is the result of joint efforts by CESPRI-Università Bocconi (Milan, IT), BETA – Universitè “Louis Pasteur” (Strasbourg, FR), IMIT-Chalmers University (Gotheborg, SE), Umea Universitet (SE), and Università degli studi di Brescia (IT). |
| Keywords: | University patents, European universities, Patent database. |
| JEL: | C81 I23 O34 |
| Date: | 2006–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cri:cespri:wp181&r=sog |
| By: | Carlos Rosell; Ajay Agrawal |
| Abstract: | The rate of university patenting increased dramatically during the 1980s. To what extent did the knowledge flow patterns associated with public sector inventions change as university administrators and faculty seemingly became more commercially oriented? Using a Herfindahl-type measure of patent assignee concentration and employing a difference-in-differences estimation to compare university to firm patents across two time periods, we find that the university diffusion premium (the degree to which knowledge flows from patented university inventions are more widely distributed across assignees than those of firms) declined by over half during the 1980s. In addition, we find that the university diversity premium (the degree to which knowledge inflows used to develop patented university inventions are drawn from a less concentrated set of prior art holders than those used by firms) also declined by over half. Moreover, in both cases the estimated increase in knowledge flow concentration is largely driven by universities experienced in patenting, suggesting these phenomena are not likely to dissipate with experience. |
| JEL: | I23 O33 O34 |
| Date: | 2006–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12640&r=sog |
| By: | Rachel Levy; Pascale Roux; Sandrine Wolff |
| Abstract: | This paper analyses the modalities according to which a large European university collaborates with firms by exploring its relational portfolio. We address this issue by exploiting a database listing more than 1000 firms having collaborated with the University Louis Pasteur between 1990 and 2002. First, using multi-correspondence analysis, we derive a four-classes typology of collaborative behaviours, each of them presenting a strong internal coherence. We obtain four distinct collaboration patterms, for which the frequency of interactions and the exclusive vs. open character of the relationships are discriminating features. Second, using a multinomial logit estimation, we show how this diversity is connected to some individual attributes of the firms: size, legal status, industrial sector and geographic distance from the public partner. |
| Keywords: | Science-industry collaborations; Typology; Industrial collaboration patterns. |
| JEL: | L21 L31 O32 |
| Date: | 2006 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2006-27&r=sog |