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The authors seek to better understand the relationships between science production, national wealth, inequality, and human development around the globe.

The chapter uses econometric models, including Granger causality, to test alternate hypotheses about whether more economic wealth is related to more science or if more science leads to more wealth.

The immediate result of our models is that a country’s wealth contributes to the conditions necessary for productive science. While large countries produce many research articles in the STEM+ fields more or less irrespective of their per capita GDP, with countries like the Soviet Union, China, or India being important contributors to world science, the most productive countries were the richer ones. GDP per capita values are important predictors for higher numbers of STEM+ research articles adjusted for population size. Nevertheless, human development and income equality also have a positive relationship with science productivity. While the effect of income equality is less strong, it has importantly and steadily increased over the last 50 years.

This chapter is among the first to show that countries with similar levels of human development that are more equal in income distribution are more productive in science, while countries of similar wealth that are more equal in income distribution are not necessarily more productive in science.

We can divide the humanity into 5,000 ethnic groups who reside in 160 distinct states in the world. On an average this implies that only one randomly picked state out of every 10 states is ethnically homogenous. In other words the borders between different ethnic groups do not accord with national borders. We, hence, live in a melting pot of ethnicity and most countries are ethnically heterogeneous. In an alternative fashion, we can make a statement about our ethnic diversity by making a simple observation that there are over 600 living language groups in 184 states in the world. There is thus a reason to believe that the human race confronts a serious and endemic ethnic diversity, which is also increasingly accompanied with unprecedented ethnic rivalry, competition, conflicts, violent clashes and all-out wars. Our chapter provides a comprehensive investigation into the economic causes and consequences of ethnic heterogeneity in our modern world. In order to understand the basic economics of ethnic diversity, we will focus our attention to what is commonly known as ‘global firms’ who employ people from diverse ethnic backgrounds. The consequences will be examined in the context of modern societies where the global firms play an important economic role.

Patent data have been exploited to track invention and international technology diffusion. We review evidence on research activity, international patenting, and income differences across countries. Guided by that evidence, we construct a model of ideas in the world economy that includes the decision of whether and where to patent them. The model makes precise connections between international patent statistics and cross-country differences in innovation, technology diffusion, market size, and strength of patent protection. We use it to organize our discussion of existing empirical studies, which typically focus on one of five core relationships: (i) national pools of knowledge and international spillovers from basic research; (ii) aggregate productivity and international technology diffusion from applied research; (iii) international patenting and the production of ideas, international diffusion, market sizes, and intellectual property regimes; (iv) the value of ideas and diffusion, market sizes, and the intellectual property regimes; or (v) investment in research and research productivity, the cost of research, and the value of ideas. While distinguishing between these five relationships proves useful, they are, of course, logically intertwined. Taking these interconnections into account will contribute to the goal of building a quantitative model of the creation, diffusion, and adoption of ideas in the global economy.

In this chapter, we analyzed the effects of internationalization on innovation, productivity, and firm performance among multinational pharmaceutical companies as representatives of a global knowledge-based industry. The empirical analysis used multiple stepwise regressions based on a sample of 149 firms headquartered in Europe and the US. The results indicate that innovation outcomes are positively correlated to the number of foreign subsidiaries (scope internationalization), whereas surprisingly, formal research and development (R&D) does not seem to directly influence innovation. This suggests that the firms benefit from local overseas subsidiaries to create and implement new innovative offerings. The number of foreign subsidiaries has a U-shaped relationship to patent productivity suggesting that firms can gain advantages by locating cost-intensive activities in low-cost countries and critical tasks in advanced market locations. Firm performance has a U-shaped relationship to sales abroad (scale internationalization) and the relationship is further enhanced by a high focus on R&D. This suggests that sales abroad enable scale economies, where R&D improves quality and relevance of products and thereby boosts performance. Finally, to validate the findings we conducted two semi-structured interviews with representative industry experts and gained further insights for an extended interpretation of results.

Studies of inequality in higher education on both undergraduate and graduate levels have rarely examined experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs). In this study, we focus on the experiences and outcomes of API students in doctoral education. More specifically, we examine socialization experiences and research productivity of three groups of students: domestic API, international API, and domestic white students. The results, based on a national cohort of PhD students in biology, reveal notable differences in experiences and outcomes of domestic and international API students. Although variation in socialization experiences explains differences in research productivity in the first year, that is not the case in the second year of doctoral study. In the second year, international API students have publication productivity comparable to their white peers, despite less favorable socialization experiences. Domestic API students, however, have lower research productivity than their white peers, even though they have comparable socialization experiences. Given the presumption of APIs’ success, especially in the STEM fields, findings for domestic API students are surprising and not aligned with the model minority stereotype. Contributions to research on API students, doctoral education, and socialization theory are discussed.

This study examines the scholarly output of accounting researchers in the periods surrounding a change in university affiliation. Our expectation that publishing activity will increase in periods around an institutional change is based on expectancy theories and informed by studies on the contract year performances of professional athletes. Using a sample of 635 accounting professors who switched universities between 2008 and 2014, the authors find evidence that accounting authors who switch universities publish more in the years around a switch compared with other years. Our research contributes to the literature on changes in university affiliation by documenting a contract year phenomenon operating within accounting academia. Practical implications for college administrators are also discussed.

This chapter provides an overview of the findings and chapters of a thematic volume in the International Perspectives on Education and Society (IPES) series. It describes the common dataset and methods used by an international research team.

The chapter synthesizes the results of a series of country-level case studies and cross-national and regional comparisons on the growth of scientific research from 1900 until 2011. Additionally, the chapter provides a quantitative analysis of global trends in scientific, peer-reviewed publishing over the same period.

The introduction identifies common themes that emerged across the case studies examined in-depth during the multi-year research project Science Productivity, Higher Education, Research and Development and the Knowledge Society (SPHERE). First, universities have long been and are increasingly the primary organizations in science production around the globe. Second, the chapters describe in-country and cross-country patterns of competition and collaboration in scientific publications. Third, the chapters describe the national policy environments and institutionalized organizational forms that foster scientific research.

The introduction reviews selected findings and limitations of previous bibliometric studies and explains that the chapters in the volume address these limitations by applying neo-institutional theoretical frameworks to analyze bibliometric data over an extensive period.

This paper tests the feasibility and empirical implications of a spatial econometric model with a full set of interaction effects and weight matrix defined as an equally weighted group interaction matrix applied to research productivity of individuals. We also elaborate two extensions of this model, namely with group fixed effects and with heteroskedasticity. In our setting, the model with a full set of interaction effects is overparameterised: only the SDM and SDEM specifications produce acceptable results. They imply comparable spillover effects, but by applying a Bayesian approach taken from LeSage (2014), we are able to show that the SDEM specification is more appropriate and thus that colleague interaction effects work through observed and unobserved exogenous characteristics common to researchers within a group.