Seminar  |  06/24/2020 | 04:30 PM  –  05:15 PM

Innovation & Entrepreneurship Seminar: How the Academic Labor Market Rewards Joint Work – Exploring the Coauthor Premium

Michael Ransom (Brigham Young University)

Virtual Talk (on invitation)


Using a unique dataset that links economics professors with their publications and the citations to those publications, we document a surprising fact: the financial reward (in terms of academic salary) is substantially higher for joint work, rather than being discounted (or prorated). This finding is robust to different specifications, although we find some support for the idea that the coauthorship premium is due to the fact that joint work is better, in the sense that it is more influential. We also examine the publications of these authors. We find strong evidence that coauthored work is more important, even after controlling for author fixed effects and journal fixed effects. Our estimates imply that coauthored publications receive about 75 percent more citations than sole-authored ones, even after accounting for the author and the journal in which it is published.


Contact Person: Michael E. Rose