In many datasets, articles are classified into sub-fields through the journals in which they have been published. The problem is that many journals are assigned to a single sub-field, but many others are assigned to several sub-fields. This paper discusses a multiplicative and a fractional...

This paper evaluates the European Paradox according to which Europe plays a leading world role in terms of scientific excellence, measured in terms of the number of publications, but lacks the entrepreneurial capacity of the U.S. to transform this excellent performance into innovation, growth,...

This paper investigates the citation impact of three large geographical areas -- the U.S., the European Union (EU), and the rest of the world (RW) -- at different aggregation levels. The difficulty is that 42% of the 3.6 million articles in our Thomson Scientific dataset are assigned to several...

This paper uses high- and low-impact citation indicators for the evaluation of the citation performance of research units at different aggregate levels. To solve the problem of the assignment of individual articles to multiple sub-fields, it follows a multiplicative strategy according to which...

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...

International surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate. At the same time, social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate...

A Melitz-style model of monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms is integrated into a simple NEG model to show that the standard assumption of identical firms is neither necessary nor innocuous. We show that re-locating to the big region is most attractive for the most productivity...

We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper’s motivating evidence we also...

This study investigates the effects of introducing elections on public goods and redistribution in rural China. We collect a large and unique survey to document the history of political reforms and economic policies and exploit the staggered timing of the introduction of elections for causal...

Though new media has become a popular source of information, it is less clear whether or not they have a real impact on economic activity. In authoritarian regimes, where the traditional media are not free, this impact might be especially pronounced. We study consequences of blog postings of a...