Estimates of the Returns to Quality and Coauthorship in Economic Academia

Abstract

Salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single-authored articles. Estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least-squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual's return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1/n times that of a single-authored paper.