What Makes a Successful Scientist in a Central Bank Evidence From the RePEc Database

Abstract

This research analyzes factors affecting the 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 80,000 scientific papers published between 1965 and 2020. The results
from Poisson regressions of citation impact measure (called the h-index) on
a number of research features suggest that economists from the U.S. 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.