Launched in November 2018 by the Trump administration, the China Initiative made administrative procedures more complicated and funding less accessible for collaborative projects between Chinese and US researchers. In this paper, we use information from the Scopus database to analyze how the China Initiative shock affected the volume and quality 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 compared to Chinese researchers with prior European collaborations. Thus, the Initiative is estimated to have reduced the number of yearly citations for Chinese researchers in the treatment group by 13 percent more than for researchers in the control group. The negative effect of the Initiative has been stronger for Chinese researchers with higher research productivity and/or who worked on US-dominated fields before the shock. Finally, we find no significant effect of the China Initiative on the volume and quality of research of US researchers with prior Chinese collaborations.

Since the late 1990s, a growing number of countries have shifted towards "illiberal democracy," a regime characterised by "free but unfair" elections while bypassing the rule of law. A significant body of literature documents the harmful effects of past dictatorships on innovation; in this paper, we extend that argument, claiming that the newer regime of illiberal democracy exerts a similarly damaging impact on innovation. Using both international and national bibliometric databases, we focus on the rise of illiberalism in Hungary. By comparing Hungarian researchers to their counterparts in other Eastern and Central European countries before and after the elections that brought Viktor Orbán to power, we quantify how Hungarian academia has been significantly affected. We develop a comprehensive set of quantitative measures to assess the effects of such illiberal policies on researchers and their academic outputs and mobility and study the heterogeneous impact depending on their seniority and field of work.

In a context of growing importance of research in a knowledge-based economy and effort towards reorganising public institutions to increase their performance without increasing public spending, in 2007, the French government passed a reform changing the governance of public universities, aimed at increasing their autonomy in particular in recruitment. First, I build a stylised model of search and matching for the French academic market nesting the cases of fully rigid and fully flexible wages and find that we should expect a positive effect of the reform on ranking between researchers and institutions. I causally analyze the impact of this reform on individual-level productivity of researchers working at public university-affiliated research facilities using bibliometric data from OpenAlex and find that there is no evidence that their research performance increases. I then show by looking at lab-to-lab flows of researchers that it also led to little reallocation. Finally, I show using techniques from the labour market ranking literature that although the overall allocation of researchers to institutions in the system is not more efficient after the reform, the reform seems to have positively selected into research more productive researchers at the bottom of the distribution.