Sen Chai (Werthem Post-Doctoral Fellow, Harvard University and NBER), Harvard University
Sen Chai (Werthem Post-Doctoral Fellow, Harvard University and NBER), Harvard University
Temporary Colocation and Collaborative Discovery
Temporary Colocation and Collaborative Discovery
The lack of empirical evidence on the impact of conferences on participants has fueled a heated debate. On the one hand, researchers are advised to attend conferences to further their careers, but at the same time there are obvious trade-offs of diverted funding and potential productivity loss while away from the bench. I investigate how temporarily colocating at conferences affects attendees’ research trajectory, in terms of collaborations and citations. I use difference-in-differences regressions on a sample of attendees from Gordon Research Conferences and most similar matched researchers, and several different cuts of the data to address endogeneity of better researchers selected to present, existing co-authors attending together and choosing to go to a conference. My results suggest that even after a transitory period being colocated, long-term collaborations between conference attendees increase with especially strong effects for those who have never published together beforehand. Conditional on collaborative ties forming, I find collaborative outputs between conference attendees draw more from the knowledge space of the conference and are also more highly cited. Conferences also enable attendees who have never been cited by other attendees to showcase their research as evidenced by increases in within-attendee citations. Given the cumulative nature of research, these findings imply that over time conferences can have a significant impact in steering the research path of attendees, from the works that they cite and build upon to the colleagues they choose to collaborate with.