Hoa Nguyen

Graduation Semester and Year

2009

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Economics

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Michael Ward

Abstract

Economics research productivity is an emerging concern because it determines education system's quality and it can help improve economic welfare. This study seeks to investigate country-level determinants of research productivity in the Economics discipline. The main variables of interest are the use of the Internet and personal computers, economic openness and higher education. I hypothesize that Internet and PC use can lower the collaboration cost and searching cost resulting in increased marginal productivity from Internet adoption and positive cross productivity effects. Therefore, if people can access Internet more, their productivity will increase. In addition, economic openness, especially greater labor mobility, increases the degree of competition in the academic labor market. In particular, successful professors have become better able to move between institutions that offer better opportunities regardless of whether they are domestic or foreign, public or private. Competition among academics generally takes the form of increased research and publication effort. This paper uses fixed effect model, distributed lag models and robust standard errors to adjust the estimated errors. It shows that there are significant effects of economic openness, study abroad, and Internet adoption on the economic research productivity. However, these effects vary across different groups of countries. Study abroad and Internet have most significant joint effects in developing countries while it has no discernable effect in developed countries. Trade and FDI, good proxies for economic openness, do have significant effects. There also are significant effects from economic openness, study abroad, personal computer use and higher education on academic concentration.

Disciplines

Economics | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

Download

Included in

Economics Commons

Share

COinS