What 5,000 Acknowledgements Tell Us About Informal Collaboration in Financial Economics

Formal collaboration between researchers via co-authorship has been shown to have a positive impact on academic productivity. But most academic collaboration is informal, e.g. in the form of commentary on research papers. We present and discuss a novel dataset on informal collaboration in Financial Economics obtained from the acknowledgement sections of over 5,000 published research papers. We construct the social network of informal collaboration connecting authors and commenters and show that a researcher’s position in this network is predictive of her future productivity and the scholarly impact of the papers she comments on. We study the characteristics of the network using various measures from network theory and characterize what determines a researcher’s position in it.