Relative Productivity Drivers of Economists: A Probit/Logit Approach for Six European Countries

Introduction Economists talk frequently about productivity. They refer to productivity of the economy in most of the cases. This paper examines the productivity of the economists themselves. There has been an increase interest on the drivers of productivity among scientists and economists in particular. Among them the country of the PhD studies, gender, north vs south and inbreeding (at the departmental or national level) has been suggested. Most of the studies employ absolute measures of productivity. We deviate from this tradition and examine relative productivity. Relative is defined in terms of deviations from the countries mean productivity. The latter is measured as papers per faculty (per year) and citations per faculty (per year). We employ a dataset that consists of 1431 economists from six countries. The north is represented by Belgium, Denmark and Germany whereas the south by Greece, Italy and Portugal.