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Abstract:
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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 . |