Christian Fons-Rosen, Assistant Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Department of Economics
Christian Fons-Rosen, Assistant Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Department of Economics
Air Travel Costs and Scientific Collaboration
Air Travel Costs and Scientific Collaboration
This paper studies how reductions in air travel costs have influenced the incidence and nature of scientific collaboration. Our empirical strategy is a difference-in-difference estimation based on the differential timing of entry of Southwest Airlines across US airport pairs. First, we evaluate the impact across US micro and metropolitan areas using a large scale dataset of publications in the natural sciences, finding a tangible increase in collaborations following the entry by the low-cost carrier. We then move to the individual level among US chemistry faculty members, where we can control for departmental funding and other individual characteristics. This allows us to further identify the underlying mechanism: entry by Southwest leads to a 50% increase in the likelihood of collaboration between scientist pairs. This effect is driven by younger scientists, scientists with above-average productivity relative to their peers and scientists in departments with below-median R&D budgets.