How Productive Are Economics and Finance PhDs?

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• Author: Yihui Lan,Kenneth W. Clements,Zong Ken Chai
• Date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8462.12531

The Australian Economic Review, vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 442–461 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8462.12531

How Productive Are Economics and Finance PhDs?

Yihui Lan, Kenneth W. Clements and Zong Ken Chai*

Abstract

This article analyses the research productivity

of more than 200 individuals in academe with

a PhD in economics and finance from (mostly)

Australian universities. We find the number of

publications accumulates linearly with experi-

ence, while citations increase exponentially,

pointing to network effects. Panel regressions

indicate: (1) the key role of experience in

determining research outcomes; (2) the usual

quadratic approach substantially under‐

estimates the role of diminishing returns to

experience; (3) the university where an

individual works is mostly unimportant for

publications and citations. ‘Prime academic

age’, when research has maximum impact, is

attained about 11 years after the PhD.

1. Introduction

The job of most academics is to teach,

conduct research and help administer their

institutions. At the ‘official’level, all three

activities are valued when it comes to

appointments, promotions and (sometimes)

salaries. Why then do academics tend to

devote disproportionate time, effort and en-

ergy to research? Perhaps they are the type

who thrive in the highly competitive environ-

ment of research—attracting funding, enga-

ging in combative seminars and being suffi-

ciently thick‐skinned to cope with dismissive

referee reports and the inevitable disappoint-

ment of journal rejections. Moreover, for

many the concept of ‘after‐hours work’is

almost non‐existent if it involves research. For

some, research continues at all hours and all

days of the week. This environment is not for

everyone. An alternative explanation is aca-

demics simply prefer the creative, unstruc-

tured environment where they can work on

research topics of their own choosing. More

simply, perhaps this environment is just

accepted as the price of remaining up‐to‐

date, productive and potentially mobile across

institutions. This attitude might guard against

being marginalised and vulnerable to being

landed with unpleasant tasks (for many, more

teaching and administration) or worse.

A third explanation for the emphasis on

research is its measurability. It is common

practice for publication counts to be a

prominent feature of many workload models.

Quality is accounted for with weighting

factors that reflect the ratings of journals in

* Lan, Clements and Chai: Department of Economics, The

University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia

Corresponding author: Clements, email <Ken.Clements@

uwa.edu.au>.

For helpful discussions and comments, the authors ar e

grateful to Emiliano Carlevaro, Simon Chang, Shawn Chen,

Kevin Fox, Dan Hamermesh, Izan, Alison Preston, Sharon

Purchase, Saroja Selvanathan, Diana Soetjipto, Lee Tate,

Rod Tyers and participants atseminars at ANU and UWA.

The authors thank Hasley Walker for helpful research

assistance. In revising the paper, the authors have benefited

from the comments of two referees and the Editor.

© 2023 The Authors. The Australian Economic Review publishedby John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of The Universityof

Melbourne, MelbourneInstitute: Applied Economic & Social Research, Faculty of Business andEconomics.

This is an open access article underthe terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and

reproduction in any medium,provided the original work is properly cited.

which publications appear. Less often, the

importance/influence of publications is as-

sessed with citation counts. Arguably, pub-

lication metrics are more objective than

assessments of teaching effectiveness, such

as student evaluations, and almost self‐

evidently, better than attempted measures of

the usefulness of service components of the

workload.

Many institutions themselves signal the

priority of research by the incentives they

provide, perhaps ‘unofficially’or even sub-

consciously. These incentives can take the

form of bestowing prestigious named chairs,

rapid promotion, access to research and travel

funds, favourable teaching allocations, better

office accommodation, and so forth. These

forces can be sufficiently powerful that they

are part of the academic culture of the

institution.

1

As resources of time, money and

space are finite, additional research necessa-

rily comes at the expense of other activities,

especially teaching. Of course, this can be

perfectly rational behaviour on the part of

institutions that also respond to the pressures

they face. They want to attract the top

researchers needed to secure a good ranking

for the institution, which, in turn, is necessary

to appeal to fee‐paying students in particular.

Top researchers can also assist with fund‐

raising from benefactors.

Against this background, it is understand-

able that there is strong interest in measuring

academics' research performance. For ap-

pointments and promotions, institutions need

to infer future prospects in terms of research

output, research quality and research influ-

ence. Citations and publications provide a

valuable input into these decisions. In this

article, we use citation and publication counts

to measure research performance.

Research is frequently a long‐term activity

that takes considerable time to formulate,

prosecute and (above all) be published.

Moreover, it can then take additional time

for research to be noticed by others and feed

into citation counts. Also, many researchers

learn on the job and after incurring initial

start‐up costs, become more productive with

additional experience. Thus, a longer‐term

horizon is needed to obtain a reliable indica-

tion of research productivity and the influence

of that research. We use the entire career

profiles of more than 200 academics to study

their research activity and its impact. These

individuals have a PhD in economics or

finance from (mostly) Australian universities.

Depending on when the individual was

awarded the PhD (the start of the academic

career for most), the length of these careers

ranges from zero years (for those just

commencing) to more than 30 years.

Allowing for cohort effects, we derive pro-

ductivity profiles that can be used to judge if

an individual with a certain number of years'

experience is above or below the benchmark.

We use publication and citation counts to

measure the quantity and ‘quality’of re-

searchers' work. In an early paper, Tuckman

and Leahey (1975) examine the relationship

between the publications and salaries of

academic economists and find substantial

value in papers published early in their career.

Additional publications are subject to dimin-

ishing returns, so much so that Tuckman and

Leahey (1975) argue the incentive effects of

this might be sufficient to explain the notice-

able drop‐off in publication rates of older,

well‐published academics. Hamermesh and

Kosnik (2023) seem to give an alternative

explanation in attributing this pattern pri-

marily to habit based on the pattern of

autocorrelation of economists' publications.

There exists a significant body of literature

on citations in economics. The seminal work

by Stigler and Friedland (1975) lays the

foundation for understanding citation patterns

of economics doctorates. Weinberg and

Galenson (2019) use citation counts of

economics Nobel laureates to identify the

age at which they produce their most

important work. One stream of research

focuses on key determinants of citations (for

example, Laband and Sophocleus 1985;

Johnson 1997; Bielinska‐Kwapisz 2012).

Bosquet and Combes (2013) find that citations

are mostly driven by publication records,

indicating a partial substitution between the

two measures. The authors also attribute

increased citation counts to larger research

443Lan et al.: Economics and Finance PhDs

© 2023 The Authors. The Australian Economic Review published by JohnWiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of The

University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute:Applied Economic & Social Research, Faculty of Business and Economics.