RT Generic
T1 Within and across department variability in individual productivity : the case of economics
A1 Perianes-Rodríguez, Antonio
A1 Ruiz-Castillo, Javier
A2 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía, 
AB University departments (or research institutes) are the governance units in any scientific fieldwhere the demand for and the supply of researchers interact. As a first step towards a formalmodel of this process, this paper investigates the characteristics of productivity distributionsof a population of 2,530 individuals with at least one publication who were working in 81world top Economics departments in 2007. Individual productivity is measured in two ways:as the number of publications until 2007, and as a quality index that weights differently thearticles published in four journal equivalent classes. The academic age of individuals,measured as the number of years since obtaining the PhD until 2007, is used to measureproductivity per year. Independently of the two productivity measures, and both before andafter age normalization, the main findings of the paper are the following five. Firstly,individuals within each department have very different productivities. Secondly, there is nota single pattern of productivity inequality and skewness at the department level. On thecontrary, productivity distributions are very different across departments. Thirdly, the effecton overall productivity inequality of differences in productivity distributions acrossdepartments is greater than the analogous effect in other contexts. Fourthly, to a largeextent, this effect on overall productivity inequality is accounted for by scale factors wellcaptured by departments’ mean productivities. Fifthly, this high degree of departmentalheterogeneity is found to be compatible with greater homogeneity across the members of apartition of the sample into seven countries and a residual category.
SN 2340-5031
YR 2014
FD 2014-03
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10016/18470
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10016/18470
LA eng
NO Ruiz-Castillo acknowledges financial support from the Spanish MEC throughgrant SEJ2007-67436
DS e-Archivo
RD 30 abr. 2024