RESEARCH / SCIENCE · MANAGEMENT SCIENCE · 2020
How Do Travel Costs Shape Collaboration?
Summary
Uses the staggered arrival of low-cost airline routes as a natural experiment in the price of face-to-face contact. Cheaper flights significantly increase collaboration between distant scientists — evidence that even in the internet era, the cost of being in the same room still shapes who works with whom.
In the paper, we expand on the question of how distance affects scientific collaborations by building a comprehensive dataset of career and publication histories of all US faculty in chemistry over 20 years. We then rely on a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the effect of shocks to travel costs between regions on the rate and type of long-distance collaborations scientists engage in. After the drop in prices induced by the entry of a low cost airline on a given route, scientific collaboration increases by 30%, an effect that is magnified when weighting output by quality. By expanding our analysis to over one million articles, we also replicate this finding within biology, physics and engineering. The benefits from the cheaper fares, however, are not uniform across scientists: Younger scientists, scientists with smaller budgets, and researchers that are more productive than their local peers respond the most. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the reduction in travel costs allowing scientists to sustain and intensify better collaborations over distance.
“Younger scientists, scientists with smaller budgets, and researchers that are more productive than their local peers respond the most.”