Does Co‐authorship Lead to Higher Academic Productivity?

Published date01 June 2015
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12070
Date01 June 2015
AuthorLorenzo Ductor
385
©2014 TheAuthor. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics published by Oxford University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and dis-
tribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
[The copyright line for this article was changed on 31 May2016 after original online publication].
OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICSAND STATISTICS, 77, 3 (2015) 0305–9049
doi: 10.1111/obes.12070
Does Co-authorship Lead to Higher Academic
Productivity?*
Lorenzo Ductor
School of Economics and Finance, Massey University, Private Bag 102904, Auckland New
Zealand (e-mail: l.ductor@massey.ac.nz)
Abstract
In recent decades, co-authorship and policies aimed at inducing academic collaboration
have increased simultaneously. Assuming that intellectual collaboration is exogenously
determined, prior studies found a negativerelationship between co-authorship and produc-
tivity.I examine a panel data on economists publishing from 1970 to 2011 to test the causal
effect of intellectual collaboration on intellectual output.As characteristics of the individual
and her opportunity set are endogenously related to both collaboration and productivity, I
instrument the amount of co-authorship by the common research interest between an author
and her potential co-authors. After controlling for endogenous co-authorship formation,
unobservable heterogeneityand time varying f actors, the effectof intellectual collaboration
on individual performance becomes positive.
I. Introduction
Scientific collaboration between authors has substantially increased in recent decades. In
journals listed in EconLit, the proportion of papers written by more than one author rose
from 24.7% during the 1970s to nearly 52% in the 2000s to 62.7% in 2011. Several authors
have provided explanations for this increase, including greater gains from specialization
and division of labour (McDowell and Melvin, 1983), falling communication costs (Hud-
son, 1996), a greater pressure to publish, increasing opportunity cost of time of reviewing
papers (Barnett, Ault and Kaserman, 1988), increasing uncertainty in the editorial review
*I thank Beata Javorcik and twoanonymous referees for excellent useful comments and suggestions that helped to
improve significantly this article. I am indebted to Maria Dolores Collado and Marco J.van der Leij for their helpful
constructive feedback, continuous support and advice. I am grateful to Marcel Fafchamps for providing data on the
Journal Quality Impact Factor and Marco J.van der Leij for his data on the co-authorship networks. I am also grateful
to Carlos Aller, Manuel Bag¨es,YannBramoull ´e, Pierre-Philippe Combes, Habiba Djebbari, Simona Fabrizi, Marcel
Fafchamps, Sanjeev Goyal, Daryna Grechyna, Gergely Horv´ath, Steffen Lippert, Silvia Martinez, Francesco Serti,
seminar participants at Otago, Granada, Cambridge, GREQAM, Valencia, St. Gallen, Compass Lexecon, Massey
and conference participants in the ASSET 2010, QED Jamboree 2010, the EEA-ESEM 2011, the SAEe 2011 and the
AFSE 2013 for useful comments. Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Programa
Formaci´on del Profesorado Universitario) is gratefully acknowledged. All errors are my own. Previous versions of
this paper circulated under the title ‘Co-authorship and Individual Academic Productivity:Evidence from Scientific
Networks’.
JEL Classification numbers: A11, J44, O30
386 Bulletin
process (Barnett et al., 1988) and the possible increase in productivity through collabora-
tion (Laband and Tollison, 2000), among others. Governmental policies aimed at encour-
aging collaboration have also increased in recent decades. These policies are based on the
assumption that intellectual collaboration results in productivity gains for the researchers.
Some examples of these policies are the EU-funded research networks (Commission of Eu-
ropean Communities, 2006) and the national Spanish Ingenio 2010 program (Ministry of
Education and Science, 2006). In both programs, researchers are required to collaborate as
a condition to obtain research funding. Other examples of policies encouraging academics
to collaborate are internal departmental policies (such as evaluations or rankings and em-
ployment or tenure decisions that require a minimum amount of publications) that do not
fully discount articles by the number of authors. Consequently, scientific collaboration is
affected by scientific policies that have progressively stimulated intellectual collaboration
(Melin and Persson, 1996), and if intellectual collaboration did not increase the sum of
research produced, a policy change would be required.1
This paper studies the effect of research collaboration on research output and contributes
to answering these questions: Does co-authorship lead to a higher academic productivity?
Is the effect of co-authorship the same for every individual?What are the channels through
which collaboration might affect individual productivity? Examining data on economists
over a 42-year period, from 1970 to 2011, I find that after taking into account the endo-
geneity inherent in the co-authorship formation process through an instrumental variable
strategy, co-authorship leads to higher individual academic productivity. However, this
effect varies significantly between high- and low-productivity individuals.
II. Related literature
The empirical literature examining the relationship between co-authorship and academic
productivity has increased in recent years. However, there is no agreement, as to whether
this relationship is positive, negative, or non-existent. Laband and Tollison (2000) provide
evidence that co-authored scientific papers are more likely to be accepted for publication
than sole-authored papers. Recently, Wuchty, Jones and Uzzi (2007) and Chung, Cox and
Kim (2009) find that papers with more authors are cited more often. In contrast, Medoff
(2003) finds that collaboration does not affect significantly research output in economics
and Hollis (2001) finds that co-authorship leads to lower academic productivity.2In a
model of teamwork formation, an author would decide to collaborate if the expected utility
from collaboration is larger than the expected utility from sole-authorship.Therefore, if the
utility only depends on research output we should expect a positive effect of co-authorship
on productivity, as twoauthors would engage in a collaboration if the expected productivity
from this collaboration is higher than the expected productivity from working alone. This
raises an interesting question: why is the effect of co-authorship not always unambiguously
1Ubfal and Maffioli (2011), Bozeman and Corley (2004) and Lee and Bozeman (2005), Defazio, Lockett and
Wright (2009) find a positive relationship between research grants and intellectual collaboration.
2Acedo et al. (2006) find very weak evidence that co-authored management papers are of higher quality than
sole-authored papers.
©2014The Author. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics published by Oxford University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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