The distribution of partnership returns: Evidence from co-authorships in economics journals

Partnerships can be found in many areas of social and economic life. These arrangements have become particularly prevalent in research and development activities where organizations increasingly seek partners to complement their own technological capabilities. R&D partnerships, however, are fraught with challenges because the conditions for optimum effectiveness and efficiency of cooperation are still not fully understood. Academic partnerships are also very common and offer a fertile ground for investigation. Academic cooperation takes many different forms and results in a wide range of outcomes (Laband and Tollison, 2000). One of the most visible outcomes is co-authored publications (Melin and Persson, 1996). Nowadays, there are extensive data available about both the context of these partnerships and the quality of their outcome. This paper explores the distribution of benefits and losses of co-authorship between scholars with asymmetric background, who cooperate through co-authorship in the publication of academic articles. We distinguish between short-term relative returns (i.e. the increase/decrease in citations of a co-authored article relative to the authors' previous publications) and the long-term ones (i.e. the increase/decrease in citations of articles subsequent to the co-authored piece). While the same variables drive the returns (benefits or losses) of both the junior and the senior co-authors, their long-term returns are driven by markedly different, and somewhat opposing, factors. The effect of the co-authors' resources matters more for the senior than for the junior academic partner. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.