Lost in the Storm: The Academic Collaborations that Went Missing in Hurricane Isaac

Abstract

By exploiting the cancellation of the 2012 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, we investigate the role of conferences in facilitating academic collaboration. We assembled datasets comprising 17,467 academics, and in difference-in-differences analysis we find that the conference cancellation led to a decrease in individuals' likelihood of co-authoring an article with another attendant by sixteen percent. Moreover, collaborations formed among attendants of (occurring) conferences are associated with more successful co-publications: an effect which is sharpest for teams that are new or non-collocated. Conferences seem to de-cluster the co-authorship network. Altogether, our findings demonstrate the importance of conferences in scientific production.

How Do Travel Costs Shape Collaboration?

“…They find that attendees are more likely to be cited by and collaborate with other participants, especially if they were new to this community of experts. In a related paper, Campos et al (2018) document that a conference cancellation led to a decrease in individuals' likelihood of coauthoring together. 4 Southwest has been described as the most significant development in the market structure of the U.S. airline industry by the Transportation Research Board (1999) and by industrial economists (Morrison 2001, Borenstein and Rose 2007, Goolsbee and Syverson 2008.…”

“…In terms of team formation, empirical evidence shows that researchers typically source collaborations through their professional networks (Freeman et al 2014), through serendipitous interactions with colocated individuals (Catalini 2018) and conferences (Boudreau et al 2017, Campos et al 2018, Chai and Freeman 2018, and by relying on the information disclosed in scientific publications. As Walsh and Lee (2015) highlight, science is organized around increasingly complex teams that resemble the operations of small R&D-intensive firms, with knowledge as their core output.…”

The Role of Conferences on the Pathway to Academic Impact

“…Boudreau et al (2017) showed that a (within institution) ninety-minute brainstorm session could substantially increase the likelihood of collaboration between participants. In Campos et al (2018), we use the same data and setting as this current paper to estimate conference effects on authors' future work. We do not find that, after the 2012 APSA cancellation, participants produced fewer quality-adjusted subsequent papers (solo or in co-authorship), but we do detect effects on academic collaborations.…”

Who presents and where? An analysis of research seminars in US economics departments

“…To the best of my knowledge, the paper is the first to provide evidence on the variables that determine (i) the scholars invited to deliver a research seminar, and (ii) where a scholar is more likely to present a research seminar. Previous papers concluded that workshops and conferences facilitate the transmission of knowledge (Iaria et al, 2018;Lopez de Leon and McQuillin, 2018;Head et al, 2019), promote collaboration among scholars (Campos et al, 2018;Chai and Freeman, 2019), increase the probability of publishing in high-quality journals (Gorodnichenko et al, 2019) and the quality of research (Minondo, 2020). I add to the literature by showing that high-quality departments are more likely to be aware of new knowledge generated in the field, because scholars producing the most promising ideas are more willing to present their new projects to such departments.…”