Research projects

One of the main goals of the project is to assess gender differences in academic productivity and collaboration. In the first article of this project, “Gender and Collaboration” (joint with Sanjeev Goyal and Anja Prummer), we documented that women have 27% lower research output than men. Suprisingly, the gender gap in research output is very stable since 1990 despite the fact that the share of women publishing in economics has increased from 5% in 1970 to 28% in 2017.

An important fraction of this gap is explained by gender differences in collaboration patterns: women have fewer different collaborators (lower degree) than men, they work more with the same collaborators (higher strength) and are more connected between each other (higher clustering coefficient). These gender differences in collaboration patterns are associated with lower performance in scientific production and explain 18% of the research output gap between men and women. This paper has been accepted in a top journal in economics, “The Review of Economics and Statistics”.

Related to this objective, in the article “When a co-author joins an editorial board” (co-authored with Bauke Visser) published in the “Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization” in 2022, we focus on academic collaborations with editorial board of economics journals. The results show that the number of publications of the author in a journal increases by 7% when his past co-author is on the editorial board of the journal. Moreover, this connection effect does not depend on the gender of the author. 

The second objective of the project tries to investigate the determinants of the different collaboration patterns between men and women using experiments. In this paper (joint with Antonio Cabrales, Ismael Rodríguez Lara y Ericka Rascón) we study how the expectations about the performance that men and women have in numerical, verbal, logical and perception tasks could affect collaboration. The preliminary findings suggest that there are no gender differences in performance in these tasks, but there are important differences in beliefs.

Finally, our project studies if women are discriminated in relevant positions in academia, analysing if there are gender differences in the probability of being a member of the editorial committee of a scientific journal. Our preliminary results reveal that there are no gender differences in the probability to become an editor.