The Research and Wealth Relationship

Using a database of 76,046 empirical economics papers published between 1985 and 2005, we report two associations. First, research output on a given country increases with the country's population and wealth, yielding a strong correlation between per-capita research output and per-capita GDP. Regressions controlling for data quality, governance and the use of English give an estimated research–wealth elasticity of 0.32; surprisingly, the U.S. is not an outlier. Second, papers written about the U.S. are 2.5 percentage-points more likely to be published in the top five economics journals after accounting for authors' institutional affiliations and the field of study. This is a large effect because only 1.5% of all papers written about countries other than the U.S. are published in first-tier journals. No similar premium for research on the U.S. is detected in second-tier general interest journals, where papers from the UK and Europe command a substantial premium instead.

That is from a paper by Jishnu Dasa, Quy-Toan Doa, Karen Shainesa, & Sowmya Srikant. A draft is here. 

Can institutions explain cross country differences in innovative activity?

From a new published paper by Cong Wang (Journal of Macroeconomics, September 2013). A draft is here:

Motivated by theoretical arguments (see e.g. and ) that assert a positive impact of institutions on R&D, this paper aims to provide some empirical analysis on the relationship between the two variables. In particular, using a core sample of 98 countries over the period 1996–2009, this paper has found a significant direct effect of institutions on R&D intensity. Countries with better institutions qualities as captured by the World Banks’ Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) tend to attract more scientists and engineers into the research field and to spend more on R&D as well. This paper has also found evidence that the effect of institutions varies in different economies characterized by different levels of financial development and human capital accumulation, but stays relatively unchanged across countries with different levels of trade openness.