The Role of Conferences on the Pathway to Academic Impact: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Abstract

We provide evidence for the effectiveness of conferences in promoting academic impact by exploiting the cancellation---due to Hurricane Isaac---of the 2012 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting. We assembled a data set of 29,142 papers and quantified conference effects, using difference-indifferences regressions. Within four years of being presented at the conference, a paper's likelihood of becoming cited increases by five percentage points. We decompose the effects by authorship and provide an account of the underlying mechanisms. Overall, our findings point to the role of short-term face-to-face interactions in the formation and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Fernanda Leite Lopez de Leon is a senior lecturer in economics at University of Kent. Ben McQuillin is a senior lecturer in economics at University of East Anglia. The authors thank three anonymous referees for helpful comments and are also grateful for useful inputs from Steve Coate, David Hugh-Jones, Arthur Lupia, Will Morgan, Judit Temesvary, Fabian Waldinger, and the seminar attendances at the Universities of East Anglia, Kent, and Portsmouth and at the 2015 Royal Economic Society Meeting and 2015 Barcelona GSE Summer Forum. Excellent research assistance was provided by Chris Bollington, Raquel Campos-Gallego, Ben Radoc, Arthur Walker, and Dalu Zhang. This research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (grant RPG-2014-107). The data used in this article will be available online, from September 2020, at: Kent Data Repository, https://doi.org/10.22024/unikent/01.01.75© 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.