The returns to scientific collaboration have been widely acknowledged. The general trend observed in top scientific journals is an increase in collaborative activities both between researchers and between institutions, especially with regard to international co-authorship. Not only there is a growing number of papers written in co-authorship, but also there is an increase in the number of co-authors. In this paper, we investigate whether similar tendencies have emerged in the scientific community of economists in Poland. Using social network analysis, we focus on collaboration between researchers publishing in five leading Polish economic journals. We find that both the number of articles written in collaboration and average number of authors per article are steadily increasing. Yet, compared to what we observe in western economic journals, the scale of collaboration is modest. Furthermore, the increase in collaborative activity which we observe is not followed by a rise in collaboration with foreign co-authors.
Existing research indicates that introducing school choice and competition into the public education system might improve the quality of schooling. Yet, up to date most empirical work on school choice has concentrated on developed countries and it is far from obvious that the experience of these countries can be of any guidance for transition economies. Our work intends to fill this gap. We concentrate on the case of Poland. We argue that in Poland, school choice and competition tends to improve average education quality and efficiency of public education expenditure.JEL classifications: I21, I22, I29.
Given current political concerns with inequality and the sustainable management of natural resources, the issue of the distribution of productive assets in rural areas has become an increasingly important focus of research. Referring to both ample historical evidence and qualitative research, rural sociologists have long postulated that the distribution of economic resources is strongly influenced by the distribution of political power. In this article we support this claim with quantitative analysis. Our focus is on the relationship between land inequality and the attainment of political power by large-scale farmers in rural Poland. Our findings suggest a strong statistical association between the current level of land inequality and the fact that mayors operate relatively large land holdings themselves. Our results are qualitatively the same no matter whether we measure land inequality as the share of land used by the largest landholders or the land Gini index. They also hold in several robustness checks.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations –citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.