Intergenerational field transitions in economics

Abstract

• We documents trends of mobility across fields in economics.• We find intergenerational field similarity is more prevalent in larger fields.• We show that researchers with different fields from their advisors are more likely to switch to highly demanded fields in the job market.• We also document a positive relation between field productivity and the median level of co-authorship at the field level. Abstract This note documents trends of socialization and intergenerational mobility across research networks (fields) in economics. Using data on advisor-advisee pairs, we find that intergenerational field similarity is more prevalent in larger and successful fields. We then show that researchers who do choose different fields than those of their advisors are more likely to switch to highly demanded fields in the job market. These results are consistent with the equilibrium of a model in which advisors' have concerns for their advisees' socialization and production outcomes. We also document a positive relation between field productivity and the median level of co-authorship at the field level, which is consistent with complementaries between socialization and productive efforts.JEL-Classification: A1, A19, A23, J62 . Key-words: intergenerational field mobility, economics fields, advisor-advisee relationships, field productivity in economics. * Hauk acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the Severo Ochoa Program for Centers of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2015-0563) and through CICYT project number ECO2015-67171-P and from the government of Catalonia (2014 SGR 1064. †

Occupational Choice with Endogenous Spillovers

“…This empirical implication of our model is consistent with evidence presented in Currarini,Jackson, and Pin (2009) showing that the number of interactions within friendship groups are increasing in size Albornoz, Cabrales, Hauk, and Warnes (2017). provide further empirical evidence for this prediction based on the analysis of co-authorships within economics fields.…”

“…This result is consistent, for example, withAzoulay, Zivin, and Wang (2010), who show that researchers collaborating with a superstar scientist experience a significant decline in their productivity (quality adjusted publication rate) after the unexpected death of their superstar collaborators. Similarly,Waldinger (2010) find that the expulsion of high quality Jewish scientists from Nazi Germany harmed, in a significant way, their students left behind.5 The connection between occupation productivity and individual socializing effort is in line withCurrarini, Jackson, and Pin (2009) and consistent with observations provided byAlbornoz, Cabrales, Hauk, and Warnes (2017).6 This result is observed byNix (2015) for the case of Sweden.…”

“…Moreover academics choose their field of research: their group. Using data scrapped from the IDEAS-RePEc websiteAlbornoz, Cabrales, Hauk, and Warnes (2017) establish that economic researchers who work in more productive fields tend to have more co-authors.18 This is indeed found byNix (2015) for the case of Sweden. After constructing a ranking of interactions with peers using Swedish data on workers, their peers, and their firms from 1985-2012,Nix (2015) compares it to estimated learning spillovers per-occupations and finds a strong correlation between those two measures.…”