Venue：Chengze Gardon RM246

Speaker：Kevin Devereux（PKU School of Economics）

Topic：Compensation for Teamwork and Professional Networks: Evidence from Research Economists

Abstract：

Workers in developed economies are increasingly compensated according to team output, but parsing individual contributions to teamwork can be difficult. I estimate productivity and its relationship to pay among academic economists, whose main outputs -- research papers -- list contributing authors. I use coauthor turnover to identify author value-added: an author's average output quality conditional on the value-added of coauthors. Linking the universe of scholarly economic research to publicly available payroll records, I study the effect of value-added on salaries. Strikingly, coauthors' value-added has a greater effect on own salary than does own value-added, suggesting the value of professional networks dominates the effect of discounting contributions based on coauthor quality. Moreover, authors are compensated for the solo-authored output of their coauthors -- which can not be reasonably attributed to them -- demonstrating the value of professional networks.

Speaker Bio：

Kevin Devereux is a Canadian empirical labour and health economist who completed his doctorate at the University of Toronto. His main strand of research focuses on the interaction between teamwork, productivity, and compensation, with applications using novel datasets resembling personnel records. He typically assembles these datasets using web scraping. He also studies employer power in labour markets, healthcare spending dynamics, firm responses to tax shocks, and gender discrimination.