Research

This paper studies the effects of two components of an organisational reform of the French university system: administrative autonomy, introduced in 2007, and access to competitive grants, introduced in 2010. The staggered and partially overlapping implementation of the two reforms, combined with the structural exclusion of a large share of French research institutions from one or both treatments, allows me to separately identify their effects on researcher mobility and research quality. Using bibliometric data from OpenAlex in a staggered differences-in-differences framework, I find that administrative autonomy itself increases mobility between French institutions but reduces research quality of French researchers, lowering citations by approximately 6\%. Receiving a competitive grant also improves research quality but not sufficiently to offset the former effect. These results are consistent with a multitasking mechanism: by making grant acquisition the most visible performance signal available to authorities allocating funding, the reform diverted effort away from research itself.

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.

We contribute to the debate on the production of ideas by examining the scientific production of an entire field. We map the evolution of economic research by classifying 300,000 articles published in 1950--2020 using text analysis methods. We identify 90 distinct topics, each characterized by a coherent set of themes and vocabulary. We document three main empirical patterns. First, topics tend to show a rise-and-fall life cycle: their publication share increases during an expansion phase, peaks, and then gradually declines. Second, despite these topic-level cycles, the aggregate scientific activity grows over time, both at the global and topic levels. Third, this growth is accompanied by a constant ``reset' in the topic composition of the discipline, with newer topics progressively displacing older ones. Altogether, our findings have implications for the debate about whether or not ideas are harder to find.

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.