We develop a two-sided matching model to analyze collaboration between heterogeneous academics and firms. We predict a positive assortative matching in terms of both scientific ability and affinity for type of research, but negative assortative in terms of ability on one side and affinity in the other. In addition, the most able and most applied academics and the most able and most basic firms ...

Academic rankings today are the backbone of research governance, which seem to fit the aims of “new public management” on the one side and the idea of the “republic of science” on the other side. Nevertheless rankings recently came under scrutiny. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of academic rankings, in particular their unintended negative consequences on the research process. To counte...

We study university projects and research collaboration projects with industry that are supported by government grants. First, we propose a theoretical model to analyze optimal decisions in these ventures. Second, we test our theoretical results with a unique dataset containing academic publications and collaborative research funds for all the academics at the major engineering departments in t...

This study examines the impact of fluctuations in entry-level labor market conditions on the graduate school enrollment decisions of newly minted undergraduate degree holders. Using repeated cross-section data for recently graduated science and engineering undergraduates from the National Survey of Recent College Graduates, and state-level unemployment rates to measure entry-level labor market ...

The Effect of College Education on Health We exploit exogenous variation in college completion induced by draft-avoidance behavior during the Vietnam War to examine the impact of college completion on adult mortality. Our preferred estimates imply that increasing college completion rates from the level of the state with the lowest induced rate to the highest would decrease cumulative mortality ...

In contrast to previous studies on the economic impact of universities that focus on the demand side, this study centres on universities’ effects on the supply side of the economy. Through a case study of the Spanish University System, this paper proposes a methodology based on counterfactual scenarios and growth accounting to estimate the long-term impacts of universities on their regional eco...

This paper explores the issue of efficiency in English higher education using data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to estimate an output distance function (which incorporates measures of both quantity and quality of teaching and research inputs and outputs) over a thirteen-year period. The study compares the efficiency estimates derived from various estimation methods, and...

Bibliometric Evaluation vs. Informed Peer Review: Evidence from Italy A relevant question for the organization of large scale research assessments is whether bibliometric evaluation and informed peer review where reviewers know where the work was published, yield similar results. It would suggest, for instance, that less costly bibliometric evaluation might at least partly replace informed peer...

IZA DP No. 11000 SEPTEMBER 2017 Gender Bias in Teaching Evaluations* This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset of 19,952 student evaluations of university faculty in a context where students are randomly allocated to female or male instructors. Despite the fact that neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected ...

Are Student Exchange Programs Worth It? The number of university students participating in exchange programs has risen sharply over the last decade, but a survey of Swiss university graduates (class of 1999 and 2001) shows that participation in student exchange programs significantly prolongs the period of time spent studying at university. Given this fact, the advantages of exchange programs f...