What makes a successful scientist in a central bank? Evidence from the RePEc database

Abstract

This research analyzes factors affecting scientific success of central bankers. We combine data from the RePEc and EDIRC databases, which contain information about economic publications of authors from 182 central banks. We construct a dataset containing information about 3312 authors and almost 80 thousand scientific papers published between 1965 and 2020. Results from Poisson regressions of citation impact measure called h-index, on a number of research features suggest that economists from the US Federal Reserve Banks, international financial institutions, and some eurozone central banks are cited more frequently than economists with similar characteristics from central banks located in emerging markets. Researchers from some big emerging economies like Russia or Indonesia are cited particularly infrequently by the scientific community. Beyond these outcomes, we identify a significant positive relationship between research networking and publication success. Moreover, economists cooperating with highly cited scientists also obtain a high number of citations even after controlling for the size of their research networks.