Digital Commons Network^™

Empirical Essays On Science And New Technology Adoption, Huifeng Yu

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The first chapter studies how the quantity and quality of research output varies over the career using 5.6 million biomedical science articles published over three decades. We show that controlling for selective attrition reconciles conflicts in a longstanding, interdisciplinary literature. While research quality declines monotonically over the career, this decline is easily overlooked because the highest “ability” authors have the longest publishing careers. Our results have implications for broader questions of human capital accumulation over the career and also for federal research policies that shift funding from late- to early-career researchers – while providing more funding to researchers when they …