Playing with technology

Monthly Labor Review, Feb, 1999

Why haven't computers and advanced telecommunication devices made work more productive? Perhaps because they can often be used as toys as well as tools, according to a cleverly pointed NBER working paper by Daniel S. Hamermesh and Sharon M. Oster.

Using quite standard economic reasoning, they create and test three propositions on the impact of high technology on patterns of collaboration and productive quality in scholarly economics:

1) Because communication is costly, distant co-authorships--working with partners who were not living in the same metropolitan area in the four years prior to publication--will be more productive than close coauthorships (or even working solo).

2) Because communication costs are being driven down by technology, the share of distant co-authorships in the production of research will increase.

3) Again because costs are declining, the productivity advantage of distant co-authorships will decrease over time.

After examining roughly a quartercentury's worth of journal citations, Hamermesh and Oster are able to find support only for proposition 2--there has indeed been a higher share of distantly co-authored articles in high-quality economics journals since 1979. However, contrary to their other propositions, the productivity of such collaborations, as measured by subsequent citations, has been lower than that of close co-authored articles and there has been no decline in their disadvantage over time.

They reconcile these findings with theory by arguing that "high-technology functions as a consumption rather than an investment good. As such, it can be welfare-increasing without increasing productivity." Essentially, some distant coauthorship projects reflect, to some extent, a willingness to pay to collaborate with friends, rather than choose the most productive possible co-author.