convertible debt corporate call policy and voluntary conversion this paper examines why in contrast to the predictions of finance theory firms do not call convertible debt when the conversion price exceeds the call price the empirical results suggest that the principal reason is because some firms enjoy an advantage of paying less in after tax interest than they would pay in dividends were the bond converted this cash flow incentive is the inverse of an investor s incentive to convert voluntarily if the converted dividends are greater than the bond s coupon because of taxation however the decisions by investors and firms are not symmetric and there exist bonds which the firm may not call and an investor will not convert the results also find that voluntary conversion is significantly related to both the conversion price and the differential between the coupon and the dividends on the converted stock

obsolescence of knowledge and career publication profiles some evidence of differences among fields in costs of interrupted careers in recent years women have received about 45 percent of all baccalaureate degrees but only approximately 20 percent of all ph d s does this imply that academic careers as compared with careers of the wider market for college graduates are less conducive to dual career family objectives evidence suggesting the relative tradeoff of these objectives is shown by the fact that over the last thirty years the zero order correlation between average cohort fertility and the proportion of ph d recipients who are women is 0 939 a female recipient of a doctorate is twice as likely as a male recipient to have specialized in the humanities and only one third as likely to have specialized in a physical science field furthermore of those who receive a doctorate in physical science a male is 60 percent more likely than a female to pursue research as a primary work activity in the humanities on the other hand a woman is at least as likely as a man to have research as an initial postdoctoral work activity obviously many factors affect opportunities and resultant decisions to enter particular careers and to select specific occupational specialties this study considers only onethe rate of obsolescence or depreciation of knowledge as reflected in the age profile of cited works this measure of the obsolescence of knowledge refers to the rate of decay in the relative frequency at which citations are made to a particular vintage of research communications as the communications age in other words the usefulness of older published research papers as an input to current research depreciates over time the rate at which this depreciation occurs is interpreted as measuring the durability of a professor s accumulated stock of knowledge evidence presented in section ii indicates that the durability of knowledge varies considerably from discipline to discipline this information raises a number of questions concerning how the durability of knowledge influences career decisions one influence considered here is that of a temporary career interruption for example if a woman experiences a break in her academic career such as for the purpose of raising children she will incur an opportunity cost in the sense that her research knowledge will to some extent become obsolete consequently her accumulated stock of knowledge will decline relative to those professors who have continuous careers the relative cost imposed on a woman who pursues dual family career objectives is higher the less durable the jobrelated knowledge this difference in relative costs is expected to alter career incentives the results presented here suggest that women who pursue academic careers have responded to these incentives before discussing the evidence on female careers i consider a more general model in which a professor is assumed to have a continuous career profile this model which is more appropriately viewed as a male model of investment behavior is used to analyze how the durability of a professor s knowledge affects his research productivity over a career interestingly the evidence suggests that a professor s response to less durable knowledge is not to compact all learning early in his career but rather to smooth learning over the career perhaps the most assistant professor arizona state university i would like to thank an anonymous referee and many friends for helpful comments on earlier drafts i am especially indebted to finis welch for valuable suggestions throughout the development of this paper the views expressed are my own and i am responsible for any possible errors

differences in social capital between 54 western european regions beugelsdijk s and van schaik t 2005 differences in social capital between 54 western european regions regional studies 39 1053 1064 based on the extant literature a newly developed index measuring social capital at the regional level in europe is presented it is shown that there are large regional differences on this social capital index it was tested if higher scores on this social capital index correlate with higher levels of economic development and regional economic growth in 54 western european regions though further research is required these preliminary results suggest a positive relationship exists between social capital and regional economic development the paper concludes with suggestions for future empirical research

job choice in academia the asymmetric international mobility of talented scientists is well documented yet there is little evidence about the reasons why scientists choose particular jobs building on an extended human capital model of science we unify a dispersed literature relevant for job choice to formulate hypotheses which we test in a unique international quasi experiment among more than 10 000 researchers we find that attractive jobs satisfy researchers taste for science and increase their expected scientific productivity responding to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in particular while salaries research funding and working with stimulating peers matter we provide unique estimates of the importance of organisational and institutional factors early stage researchers are willing to trade off a substantial amount of salary for early independence and tenure perspectives later stage researchers favour jobs which make it easy to take up new lines of research research only positions are considered as less attractive than jobs with a moderate amount of teaching our findings have important implications for the organisational design of research universities and the competitiveness of european science in light of the brain drain of highly talented scientists towards the u s

the relationships between science technologies and their industrial exploitation an illustration through the myths and realities of the so called european paradox abstract this paper discusses first the properties of scientific and technological knowledge and the institutions supporting its generation and its economic applications the evidence supports the broad interpretation that we call the stanford yale sussex synthesis second such patterns yield important implications with respect to the so called european paradox i e the conjecture that eu countries play a leading global role in terms of top level scientific output but lag behind in the ability of converting this strength into wealth generating innovations some descriptive evidence shows that contrary to the paradox conjecture europe s weaknesses reside both in its system of scientific research and in a relatively weak industry the final part of the paper identifies a few normative implications much less emphasis should be put on various types of networking and much more on policy measures aimed at strengthening both frontier research and european corporate actors

do institutions matter for regional development rodriguez pose a do institutions matter for regional development regional studies this paper discusses whether institutions matter for regional development and how to integrate them in regional development strategies it is found that while institutions are crucial for economic development generating an institution based regional development strategy is likely to be undermined by the lack of definition of what are efficient institutions problems related to the measurement of institutions to their space and time variability to the difficulties in establishing the right mix of formal and informal institutions and to the endogeneity between institutions and economic development make one size fits all approaches to operationalizing institutions difficult the paper posits that in order to overcome these problems it is crucial to distinguish between the institutional environment and institutional arrangements that is to target not the institutions which shape the unique character of any territ

are migrants more productive than stayers some evidence from a set of highly productive academic economists this article compares the average productivity of migrants who work in a country different from their country of origin and stayers whose entire academic career takes place in their country of origin in a set of 2 530 highly productive economists that work in 2007 in a selection of the top 81 economics departments worldwide the main findings are the following two first productivity comparisons depend on the cohort and the type of department for example in the top u s departments foreigners are more productive than stayers only among older individuals in the bottom u s departments this is the case for both cohorts while in the other countries the productivity of foreigners and stayers is indistinguishable for both cohorts second when we restrict our attention to an elite consisting of economists with above average productivity all productivity differences between migrants and stayers in the united states vanish as our analysis depends on observational data in which the migration decision is not exogenously identified our estimates have a descriptive rather than a causal interpretation however our results are very robust to the treatment of the elite the partition into several department categories and the definition of the cohorts and the productivity notion jel j61

do economics departments with lower tenure probabilities pay higher faculty salaries the simplest competitive labor market model asserts that if tenure is a desirable job characteristic for professors they should be willing to pay for it by accepting lower salaries conversely if an institution unilaterally reduces the probability that its assistant professors receive tenure it will have to pay higher salaries to attract new faculty our paper tests this theory using data on salary offers accepted by new assistant professors at economics departments in the united states during the 1974 75 to 1980 81 period along with data on the proportion of new ph d s hired by each department between 1970 and 1980 that received tenure in the department or at a comparable or higher quality department within the first eight years of receipt of their ph d s we find evidence that supports the hypothesis that a tradeoff existed equally importantly departments that offered low tenure probabilities to assistant professors also paid higher salaries to their tenured faculty we attribute this to low tenur

real wages over the business cycle evidence from panel data one topic on which keynes did not disagree with classical economists was the cyclical behavior of real wages keynes 1936 as well as various classical writers predicted that real wages should move countercyclically quoting the general theory p 17 in general an increase in employment can only occur through the accompaniment of a decline in real wages thus i am not disputing this vital fact which the classical economists have rightly asserted as indefeasible this prediction is based on the premise of competition and a given short run capital stock increases in employment then correspond to more intensive use of capital and through diminishing product lower real wages for this reason evidence by dunlop 1938 and tarshis 1939 that real wages move procyclically was viewed as paradoxical both dunlop and tarshis based their findings on an observed positive correlation between real and money wages which given the procyclical movement of money wages implies a positive correlation between

cumulative advantage and inequality in science the hypothesis of cumulative advantage is widely accepted in the sociology of science but empirical tests have been few and equivocal one approach originated by allison and stewart 1974 is to see whether inequality of productivity and recognition increases as a cohort of scientists ages this paper extends their work by examining true cohorts of biochemists and chemists rather than synthetic cohorts increasing inequality is observed for counts of publications but not for counts of citations to all previous publications it is also shown that a mathematical model of cumulative advantage does not imply increasing inequality when the model is modified to allow for heterogeneity in the rate of cumulative advantage however increasing inequality is implied

convertible bonds are not called late starting with ingersoll 1977b the academic literature has repeatedly sought to explain why convertible bonds are called late the findings here demonstrate there is no call delay to explain this paper finds that most convertible bonds given their call protection are called as soon as possible for those that are not there are significant cash flow advantages to delaying the median call delay for all convertible bonds is less than four months if a safety premium is desired to assure the conversion value will exceed the call price at the end of call notice period the median call period is less than a month the question of what is the optimal call policy for convertible bonds has attracted considerable attention since brennan and schwartz 1977 and ingersoll s 1977a seminal work that work suggests that the optimal call policy is to call the bond when the conversion value first exceeds the call price since forcing conversion eliminates the bondholders premium or option value however empirical studies e g ingersoll 1977b and constantinides and grundy 1987 claim that firms consistently deviate from this call policy and delay calls this claim is based on ingersoll s finding that firms wait on average until the conversion value exceeds the call price by 43 9 a result confirmed in mikkelson 1985 trying to explain this call delay phenomenon has generated an impressive literature to date however no one has actually documented whether there is a delay or measured how long the delay is in addition the existing empirical work has focused either on a subsample of called bonds or on a subsample of bonds remaining uncalled at a given point in time these partial samples are not adequate to empirically determine average call delays for convertible bonds or to distinguish between the various hypotheses proposed for call

collaboration incentives endogenous selection into single and coauthorships by surname initial in economics and management many prior studies suggest that default alphabetical ordering of coauthors in economicsconfers disproportionate professional advantages on those with an early surname initialbecause of the greater prominence it gives to the first author however these studies do notconsider that authors select into coauthorships according to the incentives identified wedevelop a model of endogenous selection into single and coauthorships around the principlethat no one wants to be second author when they expect to provide the larger contribution i e are of higher quality we test it with authorship data from economics with man agement which does not use default alphabetical ordering as a benchmark we predict foreconomics that lower quality authors with an early surname initial would be less desirablecoauthors whereas higher quality authors with a late initial would have a lower desire tocoauthor most desired are early initial authors of high quality who are therefore advan taged in forming high quality collaborations the combined effect predicts citation rankincreases with surname initial for single authored papers and decreases for coauthored we find both effects for economics when compared to management and absolutely ourfindings indicate that part of the advantage enjoyed by early surname initial authors in eco nomics could be due to the higher ability among them having more incentive compatiblecollaborators rather than merely to greater prominence

research productivity over the life cycle evidence for academic scientists the relationship between age and the publishing productivity of ph d scientists is analyzed using data from the survey of doctorate recipients national research council and the science citation index the longitudinal nature of the data allows for the identification of pure aging effects in five of the six areas studied life cycle aging effects are present only in particle physics where scientists often speak of being on a religious quest is the indication that scientific productivity is not investment motivated vintage effects are also considered the expectation that the latest educated are the most productive is not generally supported by the data copyright 1991 by american economic association

tax shields sample selection bias and the information content of conversion forcing bond calls the information content of conversion forcing bond calls depends on the after tax cash flow to bondholders if the dividend after conversion exceeds the after tax coupon but is less than the before tax coupon the call reveals unanticipated decreases in dividends and or earnings that reduce the tax shield from interest payments in contrast a call when the dividend is less than the after tax coupon reveals the timing of an anticipated shift from exceptional firm specific positive growth to the industry norm efforts to document properties of convertible calls are subject to sample selection bias because calls are disproportionately associated with positive pre call firm specific growth brennan and schwartz 1977 1980 and ingersoll 1977a show that if capital markets are perfect the optimal policy is to call and force conversion the first time the bond s conversion value exceeds its cash redemption value however ingersoll 1977b 1 and constantinides and grundy 1987 provide evidence that firms delay calling convertible debt and mikkelson 1980 1981 ofer and natarajan 1987 and singh cowan and nayar 1990 document a statistically significant negative return to equity at the call announcement to explain these results which are inconsistent with the optimal call policy and its predicted effect on equity value in a perfect capital market several asymmetric information hypotheses have been put forth mikkelson 1981 1985 hypothesizes that the negative market reaction results from the market inferring that management expects a decline in the present value of the debt s tax shield possibly due to a decline in future earnings this suggests that managers refrain from calling due to the tax shields provided by the debt harris and raviv 1985 present a signaling model in which a

knowledge creates markets the influence of entrepreneurial support and patent rights on academic entrepreneurship we use an exogenous change in german federal law to examine how entrepreneurial support and the ownership of patent rights influence academic entrepreneurship in 2002 the german federal government enacted a major reform called knowledge creates markets that set up new infrastructure to facilitate university industry technology transfer and shifted the ownership of patent rights from university researchers to their universities based on a novel researcher level panel database that includes a control group not affected by the policy change we find no evidence that the new infrastructure resulted in an increase in start up companies by university researchers the shift in patent rights may have strengthened the relationship between patents on university discovered inventions and university start ups however it substantially decreased the volume of patents with the largest decrease taking place in faculty firm patenting relationships

inventor moral hazard in university licensing the role of contracts abstract we examine commonly observed forms of payment such as milestones royalties or consulting contracts as ways of engaging inventors in the development of licensed inventions our theoretical model shows that when milestones are feasible royalties are not optimal unless the licensing firm is risk averse the model also predicts the use of consulting contracts which improve the firm s ability to monitor inventor effort because these contracts increase the firm s expected profits the upfront fee that the university can charge is higher than otherwise these results therefore support the commonly observed university policy of allowing faculty to consult with licensing firms outside of their university contracts they also support firm policies of including milestones an empirical analysis based on a survey of 112 businesses that license in university inventions supports the complementarity of milestones and consulting suggested by the theory

industry or academia basic or applied career choices and earnings trajectories of scientists we extend life cycle models of human capital investments by incorporating matching theory to examine the sorting pattern of heterogeneous scientists into different career trajectories we link differences in physical capital investments and complementarities between basic and applied scientists across industry and academic settings to individual differences in scientist ability and preferences to predict an equilibrium matching of scientists to careers and to their earnings evolution our empirical analysis using the national science foundation s scientists and engineers statistical data system database is consistent with theoretical predictions of i sorting by ability into basic versus applied science among academic scientists but not among industry scientists and ii sorting by higher taste for nonmonetary returns into academia over industry the evolution of an earnings profile is consistent with these sorting patterns the earnings trajectories of basic and applied scientists are distinct from each other in academia but are similar in industry this paper was accepted by lee fleming entrepreneurship and innovation

the great divide in scientific productivity why the average scientist does not exist we use a quantile regression approach to estimate the eects of age gender research funding teaching load and other observed characteristics of academic researchers on the full distribution of research performance both in its quantity publications and quality citations dimension exploiting the panel nature of our dataset we estimate a correlated random eects quantile regression model accounting for unobserved heterogeneity of researchers we employ recent advances in quantile regression that allow its application to count data estimation of the model for a panel of biomedical and exact scientists at the ku leuven in the period 1992 2001 shows strong support for our quantile regression approach revealing the dierential impact of almost all regressors along the distribution we also nd that variables like funding teaching load and cohort have a dierent impact on research quantity than on research quality jel classi cation c14 c23 l31 o31 o32

the changing rewards to science the case of biotechnology little is known about the form and or magnitude of compensation provided university based scientists working on firm r d this is unfortunate given the important role that university based scientists play in r d and the growing literature concerning compensation and innovation this paper sheds some light on these issues by examining the compensation of university based scientists involved with 52 biotech firms that made an initial public offering between march of 1990 and november of 1992 although the stock holdings of the university scientists are of particular interest additional forms of compensation received by the scientists are also examined

the scale and selectivity of foreign born phd recipients in the us abstract we study the scale and selectivity of foreign born phd students in science and engineering we focus on students from china india korea and taiwan which together account for most rough

revisiting optimal call policy for convertibles when a company calls its convertible bonds it typically must give the bondholders a notice period of approximately 30 days to decide whether to convert the bonds this important institutional detail substantially affects the optimal call policy for convertible bonds when the company calls the bonds it fixes the price at which bondholders can redeem them effectively giving bondholders a 30 day put option the optimal time to call the convertibles minimizes the value of the conversion option net of the put option this optimization problem is solved here and a simple decision rule for the company results this solution contains those of previous researchers as a special case

globalization brain drain and development this paper reviews four decades of economics research on the brain drain with a focus on recent contributions and on development issues we first assess the magnitude intensity and determinants of the brain drain showing that brain drain or high skill migration is becoming a dominant pattern of international migration and a major aspect of globalization we then use a stylized growth model to analyze the various channels through which a brain drain affects the sending countries and review the evidence on these channels the recent empirical literature shows that high skill emigration need not deplete a country s human capital stock and can generate positive network externalities three case studies are also considered the african medical brain drain the exodus of european scientists to the united states and the role of the indian diaspora in the development of india s information technology sector we conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for education immigration and international taxation policies in a global context

the governance and performance of universities evidence from europe and the us we test the hypothesis that universities are more productive when they are both more autonomous and face more competition using survey data we construct indices of university autonomy and competition for both europe and the united states we show that there are strong positive correlations between these indices and multiple measures of university output to obtain causal evidence we investigate exogenous shocks to us universities expenditures over three decades these shocks arise through the political appointment process which we use to generate instrumental variables we find that an exogenous increase in a university s expenditure generates more output measured by either patents or publications if the university is more autonomous and faces more competition exploiting variation over time in the stakes of competitions for us federal research grants we also find that universities generate more output for a given expenditure when research competitions are high stakes we draw lessons arguing that european universities could benefit from a combination of greater autonomy and greater accountability greater accountability might come through increased reliance on competitive grants enhanced competition for students and faculty promoted by reforms that increase mobility and yardstick competitions which often take the form of assessment exercises philippe aghion mathias dewatripont caroline hoxby andreu mas colell and andre sapir

the impact of research grant funding on scientific productivity in this paper we estimate the impact of receiving an nih grant on subsequent publications and citations our sample consists of all applications unsuccessful as well as successful to the nih from 1980 to 2000 for standard research grants r01s both ols and iv estimates show that receipt of an nih research grant worth roughly 1 7 million leads to only one additional publication over the next five years which corresponds to a 7 percent increase the limited impact of nih grants is consistent with a model in which the market for research funding is competitive so that the loss of an nih grant simply causes researchers to shift to another source of funding

the economics of academic tenure a relational perspective abstract this analysis draws on recent work in analytical labor economics that shows the value of stable long term employment relationships tenure is conventionally portrayed as an economically wasteful institution justified if at all by its non economic value the present analysis identifies ways in which an extended probationary period followed by a lifetime guarantee of a well defined job is well adapted to features of academic work the most important of these are a the difficulty of monitoring faculty work performance and the highly specific character of b faculty jobs and c the training those jobs require the probation tenure system is contrasted with term contracting case studies support the theoretical inferences about the drawbacks of term contracting in an academic setting

the evolution of the scientific productivity of highly productive economists this paper studies the evolution of research productivity of a sample of economists working in the best 81 departments in the world in 2007 the main novelty is that in so far as a productivity distribution can be identified with an income distribution we measure productivity mobility in a dynamic context using an indicator inspired in an income mobility index suggested by fields 2010 for a two period world productivity is measured in terms of publications weighted by the citation impact of the journals where each article is published in the periodical literature we study the evolution of average productivity productivity inequality the extent of rank reversals and productivity mobility for seven cohorts as well as the population as a whole we offer new evidence confirming previous results about the heterogeneity of the evolution of productivity for top and other researchers however the major result is that contrary to what was expected for our sample of very highly productive scholars the effect of rank reversals between the two periods on overall productivity mobility offsets the effect of an increase in productivity inequality from the first to the second period in the youngest five out of seven cohorts jel a11 a12 b41 d63 i32

property rights and entrepreneurship in science this paper examines the evolving relationship in science between the reward structure and entrepreneurial activity we draw a distinction between two types of property rights basic science is fostered by a mechanism of reputational rights technological advances and the products and processes they produce are fostered by a mechanism of proprietary rights the two forms of property rights differ markedly in terms of the incentives they provide to share information in a timely fashion we argue that because of a host of factors university based scientists in certain fields are more likely to privatize knowledge today than in the past trading reputational rights for proprietary rights events in the life sciences serve as a case study a discussion of how privatization affects basic science follows although the evidence is far from complete we conclude that the movement towards privatization may be more beneficial to product development and the scientists engaged in the activity than to basic science

too much of a good thing on the growth effects of the eu s regional policy the european union eu provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states from two pools the structural funds and the cohesion fund the main goal of the associated transfers is to facilitate convergence of poor regions in terms of per capita income to the eu average we use data at the nuts3 level from the last two eu budgetary periods 1994 1999 and 2000 2006 and generalized propensity score estimation to analyze to which extent the goal of fostering growth in the target regions was achieved with the funds provided and whether or not more transfers generated stronger growth effects we find that overall eu transfers enable faster growth in the recipient regions as intended but we estimate that in 36 of the recipient regions the transfer intensity exceeds the aggregate efficiency maximizing level and in 18 of the regions a reduction of transfers would not even reduce their growth we conclude that some reallocation of the funds across target regions would lead to higher aggregate growth in the eu and could generate even faster convergence than the current scheme does

quality of government and the returns of investment examining the impact of cohesion expenditure in european regions rodriguez pose a and garcilazo e quality of government and the returns of investment examining the impact of cohesion expenditure in european regions regional studies this paper sets out to examine the relationship between the quality of local and regional governments and regional economic performance linking government quality to the returns of european union structural and cohesion funds using primary data on government quality collected by the quality of government institute combined with world bank global governance indicators data a two way fixed effect panel regression model is conducted for a total of 169 european regions during the period 1996 2007 the results of the analysis underline the importance of government quality both as a direct determinant of economic growth as well as a moderator of the efficiency of structural and cohesion funds expenditure the analysis finds that both european union investments targeting regions and quality of government simultaneously make a difference fo

the role of time value in convertible bond call policy abstract since the seminal work of ingersoll 1977b the optimal time in which a firm should redeem its outstanding convertible bonds has received large attention by the financial literature several studies have put forward a number of possible costs and benefits for a firm if it interrupts the life of its convertible bonds prior to their contractual maturity however in this paper we argue that the managerial decision to call back a convertible bond is mainly driven by a fundamental variable almost neglected up until now the time value extraction from bondholders conversion option accordingly we propose a measure for the effective convenience of calling which we define as net time value advantage and we show using a survival analysis that it is more effective than previously proposed measures in explaining the firms observed call policy

convertible call policies an empirical analysis of an information signaling hypothesis abstract this paper tests an information signaling hypothesis as a potential explanation for corporate convertible bond call policies and for the negative share price reaction to the announcement of the calls we test this hypothesis by trying to ascertain whether the information signaled is realized our results show an unexpected decline in the firm s performance subsequent to the call we also find significant negative cumulative returns during a sixty month period following the calls

regional determinants of technical efficiency evidence from the greek economy abstractthis paper emphasizes the role of regional determinants in the technical efficiency of the greek economy we employ a regional production function which is simultaneously estimated with an inefficiency equation the results underline the considerable and growing core periphery disparities in technical efficiency they show the significant efficiency enhancing impact of intra regional market access and its dispersion they also demonstrate that interregional market access specialization sectoral concentration and human capital exert a positive but varying influence on the efficiency of greek regions

transforming european regional policy a results driven agenda and smart specialization the paper examines the nature rationale and logic of the reforms to eu cohesion policy a particular focus of the paper is on the concept of smart specialization and the use of this concept to help facilitate a results oriented policy agenda on the one hand the arguments underpinning the reforms in part relate to modern thinking regarding the role of industrial policy on the other hand they also partly relate to advances in our understanding of the relationships between economic geography technology and institutions at the same time the specific features of the eu context also heavily influence the nature and logic of the changes whereby legal and institutional matters linking cohesion policy to other eu policies all play an important role

nonparametric tests of alternative option pricing models using all reported trades and quotes on the 30 most active cboe option classes from august 23 1976 through august 31 1978

the effects of publication lags on life cycle research productivity in economics we investigate how increases in publication delays have affected the life cycle of publications of recent ph d graduates in economics we construct a panel dataset of 14 271 individuals who were awarded ph d s between 1986 and 2000 in u s and canadian economics departments for this population of scholars we amass complete records of publications in peer reviewed journals listed in the jel a total of 368 672 observations we find evidence of significantly diminished productivity in recent relative to earlier cohorts when productivity of an individual is measured by the number of aer equivalent publications diminished productivity is less evident when the number of aer equivalent pages is used instead our findings are consistent with earlier empirical findings of increasing editorial delays decreasing acceptance rates at journals and a trend toward longer manuscripts this decline in productivity is evident in both graduates of top 30 and non top 30 ranked economics departments and may have important implications for what should constitute a tenurable record we also find that the research rankings of top economics departments are a surprisingly poor predictor of the subsequent research rankings of their ph d s graduates jel a11 j24 j29 j44