TOOLS OR TOYS? THE IMPACT OF HIGH TECHNOLOGY ON SCHOLARLY PRODUCTIVITY

I. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION In the past several decades, investment that makes communication easier has increased rapidly in the United States and other developed economies. Since the mid-1980s a combination of technical change and deregulation has also reduced long-distance telephone rates in the United States by 50%, reported by Allen (1995). Pitney-Bowes (1997) reported that fax usage increased by 20% between 1996 and 1997 alone, and electronic mail (e-mail), unknown before 1985, is ubiquitous today. Popular discussion of a wide range of additional examples of rapidly declining prices and explosive growth of the use of telecommunications is provided by Cairncross (1997). Attempts to measure the impact on aggregate total factor and labor productivity of these supposedly productivity-enhancing investments in broad-reaching technical improvements, such as computing machinery and communications equipment, have not met with great success, as in Morrison (1997), but see Greenan and Mairesse (1996). (1) An alternative to measuring effects on the broader economy is to measure the impact of generalized technical change on productivity in specific activities observed at the micro level. An earlier literature, including Griliches (1958) and Trajtenberg (1989), has clearly traced the effect of specific innovations in raising productivity in specific sectors of the economy. This article expands on that tradition by trying to identify the effect of the recent broad revolution in communications on one activity--scholarly publishing. We propose studying scholarly publishing before and after technical change greatly lowered communication costs. We examine in particular whether increasing ease of communication has altered scholars' choices about their methods of production, and whether those methods yielded changes in the productivity of scholarly activity that are consistent with increasing access to new communications technologies. (2) In section II we discuss a model of the production process in scholarly writing in relation to the cost of communications; in section III we describe the unique data set we assembled to examine the relation between technical change and scholarly productivity. Section IV presents the results of using these data to test the hypotheses that we develop, and section V compares coauthored to solo-authored studies and provides a suggestion for the increased prevalence of the former. Section VI offers a consistent explanation for most of the results. II. A MODEL OF SCHOLARLY PRODUCTION The example that we use in this study of the impact of technology is the nature and outcomes of the choices of co-workers by authors of scholarly publications in economics. The importance of team research has been stressed by a number of authors studying the economics of innovation, including Dasgupta (1988), who also presents a research summary, so that our specific example has broader implications for the study of technical change. Has the decline in the cost of communication altered scholars' choices in a way consistent with these technologies increasing scholarly productivity? In examining scholarly productivity, we focus on research output. In particular, we view scholars as having three production choices: (1) work solo, s; (2) work with close-by coauthor(s), c; or (3) work with distant coauthor(s), d. In the model in this section, the scholar is assumed to choose a production technology that maximizes his or her scholarly productivity, measured as the quality of the article produced. In section VI we a dopt an alternative characterization of a scholar's choices. We assume that the scholar has a wide range of potential research activities to choose among and has perfect knowledge of the productivity P (valued in dollars) of all potential matches s, [c.sub.i] [member of] C and [d.sub.i] [member of] D. (3) Each match generates one solo-equivalent article per period. …