Countries often spend billions on university research. There is growing interest in how to assess whether that money is well spent. Is there an objective way to assess the quality of a nation's world-leading science? I attempt to suggest a method, and illustrate it with modern data on economics....

Countries often spend billions on university research. There is growing interest in how to assess whether that money is well spent. Is there an objective way to assess the quality of a nation's world-leading science? I attempt to suggest a method, and illustrate it with modern data on economics....

Using the German re-unification as a natural experiment, we analyze the role of increased competition in academic productivity. We employ a unique dataset on East and West German scientists' publications in fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) before and after the...

Journalists and others have asked me whether the favourable RAE 2008 results for UK economics are believable. This is a fair question. It also opens up a broader and more important one: how can we design a bibliometric method to assess the quality (rather than merely quantity) of a nation’s...

We study the effect of a large set of department characteristics on individual publication records. We control for many individual time-varying characteristics, individual fixed-effects and reverse causality. Department characteristics have an explanatory power that can be as high as that of...

In the past two decades China leaped from bit player in global science and engineering (S&E) to become the world's largest source of S&E graduates and the second largest spender on R&D and second largest producer of scientific papers. As a latecomer to modern science and engineering, China...

Few adolescents in the developing world receive sufficient guidance to make crucial life decisions during the transition from secondary to postsecondary education and into the labor market. Consequently, a significant number of graduates regret the decisions they make. The excessive rigidity of...