Sharing is Caring? Knowledge Diffusion in Researcher Networks

Abstract

Social interactions are at the core of many economic processes, including research and development. Yet their contribution to innovation is not well understood. A novel dataset on more than 19,000 economists linked to more than one million unique research projects and fifty million tweets (#EconTwitter) is used as laboratory to explore the relationship between different social interactions and research outcomes. Results suggest that interactions play a dominant role in the idea generation phase of research and a lesser one in the context of ongoing projects. They seem to matter little for completed research projects. More socially active scholars are more productive, as measured by the number of papers written, and their working papers are more visible (i.e., downloaded more frequently). A working paper being endorsed leads to an increase in downloads by 20%. However, indicative of a trade-off in spending their valuable time, these projects are less impactful based on citation measures.

Keywords: innovation, social networks, peer effects, twitter