The "Read or Write" Dilemma in Academic Production: A European Perspective

This paper investigates the production of research in business and economics. A scholar's income is positively related to the quantity and quality of research. In turn, the quality of a paper depends on the scholar's human capital and the external production of research. The individual scholar is subject to a trade-off between writing more papers or reading in order to upgrade her skills. In the Nash symmetric equilibrium, the quantity and quality of published papers are jointly determined. Under reasonable assumptions about the research production process, in equilibrium researchers write too many papers of a too low quality, as compared to the cooperative outcome. Policy implications can be inferred from the model.