Firm location affects the firm-level impacts of Research and Development (R&D) grants, but the mechanisms through which such place effects occur remain underexplored and unresolved. We explore this by considering two key spatial characteristics: (1) population agglomeration economies (across urban and rural firms); and (2) within-industry concentration effects. Using novel data and combining matching, weighting, and regression-based approaches, we find within-industry concentration effects to accentuate the impact of R&D grants on firms’ R&D expenditure and R&D employment. We only find population agglomeration economies to matter for R&D employment. The paper offers novel theoretical insights, with important implications for place-based policy.
This paper examines how school and workplace closures affected the research productivity of female and male economists. Prior evidence shows that unplanned school closures reduce mothers’ labour supply substantially more than fathers’, consistent with an uneven distribution of care-giving responsibilities. We combine a global dataset of more than 700,000 working papers listed on IDEAS/RePEc with country- and day-specific information on school holidays, COVID-19-related school closures, and workplace activity. We document a large and statistically significant decline in publications by female economists in 2020, concentrated in places and periods with reduced workplace activity. Beyond pandemic-specific disruptions, we also find recurrent declines in the female authorship share during and immediately after regular school holidays, producing sizeable seasonal declines in women’s publications between December and January and from June through August.
Recent research observes declining or no returns from the quality of local colleagues on a researcher’s productivity but positive spill-overs between co-authors. This paper tests benefits from research links between department colleagues below the level of co-authorship. Based on data from the CVs of around 1,000 highly-cited economists, non-routine articles receive around 30 percent more citations when recent university colleagues are thematically connected. The number of star colleagues without a research link has no direct effect on individual papers, nor have future colleagues after the publication date. The timing of the impact, the type of affected research, and zero estimates for other personal links are used to establish the causality of benefits from local, thematically connected colleagues.
This paper examines two hundred years of labour market participation in American literature across gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background. We combine microdata from decennial US Census counts from 1850 (100% samples until 1940) with yearly biographical information on 473 American authors in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and track their representation across measures of literary, public, and commercial success including Kindlers Literaturlexikon, Publisher’s Weekly bestselling lists, Goodreads, and Wikipedia. We investigate the role of large cities as gateways for minorities, women, and migrants to literary participation, and how location choices and migration along ethnic networks may reinforce group outcomes.
We find that at the turn of the twentieth century, female authors were over-represented in bestselling lists relative to the author population but under-represented in modern canons. A marked dip in bestselling books by women during the mid-twentieth century is not observed for critically acclaimed publications, suggesting both an increasingly difficult market for female writers and a convergence of gender roles across commercial and critical success. American writers are overwhelmingly, and until WWI almost exclusively, white; literacy rates and location alone cannot account for differences in outcomes across ethnic groups. Our findings show that methodological choices, including which data sources and success metrics are used, substantially affect conclusions about representation in the arts.