Abstract--Economists' productivity over their careers and as measured by publication in leading journals declines very sharply with age. There is no difference by age in the probability that an article submitted to a leading journal will be accepted. Rates of declining productivity are no greater among the very top publishers than among others, and the probability of acceptance is increasingly related to the author's quality rather than the author's age.

It is well known that productivity declines with age in a wide range of activities. Lehman (1953) suggests an early peak in productivity in a variety of scientific and artistic endeavors, and Diamond (1986) documents the pattern for several scholarly pursuits. Levin and Stephan (1992) provide clear evidence that this decline exists even after careful attempts to account for individual and cohort differences. Fair (1994) finds declines in physical ability among elite runners, as does Lydall (1968,pp. 113 passim) in physical abilities of the population generally. In this study we examine productivity declines in our own field. The main new results arise from our use of two different types of information, the equivalent of household and establishment data, to study the stone field over essentially the same period of time. Section I discusses the general results on aging and productivity, whereas section II presents evidence of the importance of heterogeneity.

I. Declining Productivity with Age

Using the American Economic Association (AEA) Directory of Members, we identified tenured economics faculty at 17 top research institutions and obtained the years of their Ph.D. degrees.[1] With the citation index of the Journal of Economic Literature we replicated portions of the curricala vitae of each of the 208 economists currently in the economics departments of those institutions who received Ph.D. degrees between 1959 and 1983.[2]

To measure productivity we construct three indexes, combining papers published in refereed journals. Prior research suggests that, at least in terms of salary determination, the returns from nonreferred publications are quite low Sauer (1988), so that we ignore such publications in calculating these measures. I₁ weights an article by the journal where it appears based on citations to that journ

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] 下一页

《AGING AND PRODUCTIVITY AMONG ECONOMISTS》这篇优秀的“语言文化”由知识宝库收集，来源于互联网和会员投稿，仅供参考和学习，文章版权归原作者所有，请在确认获得著作人合法授权后使用。