How Winning the Fields Medal Affects Scientific Output

Research productivity usually falls after scientists receive a Nobel Prize (Zuckerman, 1967), and that is because their obligations and activities change. It turns out that the same happens to mathematicians who win the Field Medal, although productivity declines for a different reason. 

From a paper by George J. Borjas and Kirk B. Doran

The abstract 

Knowledge generation is key to economic growth, and scientific prizes are designed to encourage it. But how does winning a prestigious prize affect future output? We compare the productivity of Fields medalists (winners of the top Mathematics prize) to that of similarly brilliant contenders. The two groups have similar publication rates until the award year, after which the winners’ productivity declines. The medalists begin to “play the field,” studying unusual topics at the expense of writing papers. This strategy is consistent with a model of human capital investments under uncertainty: the wealth effect of the prize encourages riskier knowledge investments.

Getting tenure might have a similar effect, on average, on risk taking and productivity.  
HT: Jonas Holmstrom.

Mathematicians

It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a large post-1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their American counterparts. We find a negative productivity effect on those mathematicians whose research overlapped with that of the Soviets. We also document an increased mobility rate (to lower-quality institutions and out of active publishing) and a reduced likelihood of producing “home run” papers. Although the total product of the pre-existing American mathematicians shrank, the Soviet contribution to American mathematics filled in the gap. However, there is no evidence that the Soviets greatly increased the size of the “mathematics pie.” Finally, we find that there are significant international differences in the productivity effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that these international differences can be explained by both differences in the size of the émigré flow into the various countries and in how connected each country is to the global market for mathematical publications.

 That is from the new paper "The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians" by Borjas and Doran. A graph from the paper: