Research

Since the late 1990s, an increasing number of countries have turned to “illiberal democracy,” a regime that maintains “free but unfair” elections while systematically undermining the rule of law. In this paper, we argue that modern illiberal democracies cause detrimental effects on research. Using both national and international bibliometric data, we compare researchers exposed to illiberal policies in Hungary with their peers in other Central European countries prior to and after the first re-election of Viktor Orbán in 2010. We find that Hungarian researchers increasingly shift their publication efforts toward national-language journals with lower quality and are more likely to leave the country altogether. We show that political pressure is a key driver of these effects: researchers experience radically different patterns in terms of research outcomes depending on their political alignment. Researchers perceived as political opponents are more negatively impacted in both their publication output and in collaboration networks, decreasing them both by about a quarter of the pre-shock value per year. Yet, they are more likely to publicly criticize the regime. Finally, researchers working on topics related to gender issues are also more affected and experience a decrease of 10% of their total publications and of 30% of their publications in top journals.

At the end of the 1990s, recognizing the growing importance of universities in an increasingly globalized, tertiarized and knowledge-based economy, the countries constituting the European Union made a series of agreements aiming at harmonizing and increasing the quality of their national university systems. In France, this process took the form of the 2007 university reform aimed at increasing the autonomy of French university in particular in recruitment. In this paper, I analyse the effect of the reform on the research productivity and the global allocation of researchers in French universities. First, I build a stylised model of search and matching for the French academic market. Second, I estimate on bibliometric data the causal effect of the reform on the flows between universities and on the productivity of researchers at universities in France. Finally, I use the results of these regressions and administrative employer-employee data to calibrate the model and provide estimates for welfare effects.

Launched in November 2018 by the Trump administration, the China Initiative was meant to “protect US intellectual property and technologies against Chinese Economic Espionage”. In practice, it made administrative procedures more complicated and funding less accessible for collaborative projects between Chinese and US researchers. In this paper we use informa tion from the Scopus database to analyze how the China Initiative shock affected the volume, quality and direction of Chinese research. We find a negative effect of the Initiative on the average quality of both the publications and the co-authors of Chinese researchers with prior US collaborations. Moreover, this negative effect has been stronger for Chinese researchers with higher research productivity and/or who worked on US-dominated fields and/or topics prior to the shock. Finally, we find that Chinese researchers with prior US collaborations reallocated away from US coauthors after the shock and also towards more basic research.