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Working papers or preprints have become an important part in the scientific landscape. Such papers present research before (potentially) being published in refereed journals. But is every working paper finally published in a journal? We answer this question for four major working paper series in economics. Based on linked data in RePEc and a random sample we provide an estimate of 66.5% of more than 28,000 investigated working papers that are published in a journal. About 8% are released as a book chapter. For the remaining 25.5% we find no evidence for what happened to the article.

This study is intended to facilitate fair research evaluations in economics. Field- and time-normalisation of citation impact is the standard method in bibliometrics. Since citation rates for journal papers differ substantially across publication years and Journal of Economic Literature classification codes, citation rates should be normalised for the comparison of papers across different time periods and economic subfields. Without normalisation, both factors that are independent of research quality might lead to misleading results of citation analyses. We apply two normalised indicators in economics, which are the most important indicators in bibliometrics: (1) the mean normalised citation score (MNCS) compares the citation impact of a focal paper with the mean impact of similar papers published in the same economic subfield and publication year. (2) PPtop 10 % is the share of papers that belong to the 10% most cited papers in a certain subfield and time period. Since the MNCS is based on arithmetic averages despite skewed citation distributions, we recommend using PPtop 10 % for fair comparisons of entities in economics. In this study, we apply the normalisation methods to 294 journals (including normalised scores for 192,524 papers). We used the PPtop 10 % results for assigning the journals to four citation impact classes. Seventeen journals have been identified as outstandingly cited. Two journals, Quarterly Journal of Economics and Journal of Economic Literature, perform statistically significantly better than all other journals. Thus, only two journals can be clearly separated from the rest in economics.

In this article, we revisit the analysis of Laband and Tollison (Appl Econ 38(14):1649–1653, 2006) who documented that articles with two authors in alphabetical order are cited much more often than non-alphabetized papers with two authors in the American Economic Review and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Using more than 120,000 multi-authored articles from the Web of Science economics subject category, we demonstrate first that the alphabetization rate in economics has declined over the last decade. Second, we find no statistically significant relationship between alphabetized co-authorship and citations in economics using six different regression settings (the coefficients are very small). This result holds mostly true when accounting both for journal heterogeneity and intentionally or incidentally alphabetical ordering of authors. We find some evidence that alphabetization in case of two authos increases citations rates for very high-impact journals. Third, we show that the likelihood of non-alphabetized co-authorship increases the more authors an article has.

We compare Covid-related working papers in economics to non-Covid-related working papers in four dimensions. Based on five well-known working papers series and data from the RePEc website, we find that Covid papers mainly cover topics in macroeconomics and health, they are written by larger teams than non-Covid papers, are more often downloaded and they receive more citations relative to non-Covid papers.

Many papers in economics that are published in peer reviewed journals are initially released in widely circulated working paper series. This raises the question about the benefit of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal in terms of citations. Specifically, we address the question: to what extent does the stamp of approval obtained by publishing in a peer-reviewed journal lead to more subsequent citations for papers that are already available in working paper series? Our data set comprises about 28,000 working papers from four major working paper series in economics. Using panel data methods, we show that the publication in a peer reviewed journal results in around twice the number of yearly citations relative to working papers that never get published in a journal. Our results hold in several robustness checks.

We use archetypoid analysis as a new tool to categorize institutions and faculties of economics. The approach identifies typical characteristics of extreme (archetypal) values in a multivariate data set. Each entity under investigation is assigned relative shares of the identified archetypoid, which show the affiliation of the entity to the archetypoid. In contrast to its predecessor, the archetypal analysis, archetypoids always represent actual observed units in the data. The approach therefore allows to classify institutions in a rarely used way. While the method has been recognized in the literature, it is the first time that it is used in higher education research and as in our case for institutions and faculties of economics. Our dataset contains seven bibliometric indicators for 298 top-level institutions obtained from the RePEc database. We identify three archetypoids, which are characterized as the top-, the low- and the medium-performer. We discuss the assignment of shares of the identified archetypoids to the institutions in detail. As a sensitivity analysis we show how the classification changes when for four and five archetypoids are considered.

In research into higher education, the evaluation of completion and dropout rates has generated a steady stream of interest for decades. While most studies only calculate quotes using student and graduate numbers for both phenomena, we propose to additionally consider the budget available to universities. We transfer the idea of the excellence shift indicator [1] from the research to the teaching area, in particular to the completion rate of educational entities. The graduation shift shows the institutions' ability to produce graduates as measured against their basic academic teaching efficiency. It is an important advantage of the graduation shift that it avoids the well-known heterogeneity problem in efficiency measurements. Our study is based on German universities of applied science. Given their politically determined focus on education, this dataset is well-suited for introducing and evaluating the graduation shift. Using a comprehensive dataset covering the years 2008 to 2013, we show that the graduation shift produces results, which correlate closely with the results of the well-known graduation rate and standard Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Compared to the graduation rate, the graduation shift is preferable because it allows to take the budget of institutions into account. Compared to the DEA, the computation of the graduation shift is easy, the results are robust, and non-economists can understand them results. Thus, we recommend the graduation shift as an alternative method of efficiency measurement in the teaching area.

Ausgaben für Forschung und Entwicklung (FuE) sind essenziell für die Wettbewerbsposition eines Unternehmens sowie dessen (langfristigen) Erfolg. Darüber hinaus spielen FuE für die langfristigen Produktionsmöglichkeiten einer Volkswirtschaft eine wichtige Rolle. Daten der ifo Konjunkturumfrage zeigen, dass der relative Anteil der innovierenden Industriefirmen 2022 etwas abgenommen hat. Ein Rückgang wurde auch schon für 2021 beobachtet. Der prozentuale Anteil der Beschäftigten, die FuE betreiben, sowie der Anteil der Ausgaben am Umsatz waren ebenfalls rückläufig. Dennoch ist keine grundlegende Abkehr der Industrie in Deutschland zu erkennen.

Materialmangel ist weiterhin ein großes Problem in der Industrie. Der vorliegende Artikel zeigt aktuelle Entwicklungen auf Basis der ifo Umfrageergebnisse für die Industrie auf. Die Unternehmen rechnen mit einer Auflösung der Engpässe Mitte 2023. Im Oktober 2021 hofften sie noch, dass sich die Probleme bis Mitte dieses Jahres erledigt hätten.