This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific about the citation process of 3.7 million articles published in the period 1998-2002 in 219 Web of Science categories, or sub-fields. Reference and citation distributions have very different characteristics across sub-fields. However, when...

The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate that a blend of welfare economics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the distribution of the citations received by scientific papers in the periodical literature. The paper begins by reviewing the connection between basic...

The paper is devoted to an econometric analysis of learning foreign languages in all parts of the world. Our sample covers 193 countries and 13 important languages. Four factors significantly explain learning, two of which affect the broad decision to learn, while two concern as well the choice...

We study a number of mechanisms through which an economy can be stuck at a high unemployment equilibrium because a poor labour market is associated with support for poor policy. These mechanisms are consistent with the relative scarcity of measures that have been undertaken to cure unemployment....

Using a data set of highly cited researchers in all fields of science, we show that the gap in scientific performance between Europe, especially continental Europe, and the USA is large. We model the number of highly cited researchers in a sample of countries as a function of physical and human...

The citation analysis of the research output of the German economic research institutes presented here is based on publications in peer-reviewed journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index for the 2000 - 2009 period. The novel feature of the paper is that a count data model quantifies...