Accounting For Compositional Effects in Measuring Inter-Country Research Productivity Differences: The Case of Economics Departments in Four European Countries

Introduction Most of cross country studies on research productivity differences do not take into account compositional differences in academic staff force, such as sex, years of experience, origin of PhD studies, even though there are well documented evidence that (a) males tend to publish more than females (Gupta et al., 1999); (b) junior academic staff tend to publish more and in better outlets than senior stuff (Ben-David, 2010); and (c) academic staff with PhD studies in North America tend to be more productive (Katranidis et al., 2014). These aspects of observed faculty heterogeneity affect research productivity and are expected to have an impact on country average performance (Combes et al., 2003).