Age, Cohort and Co-Authorship

The previously documented trend toward more co- and multi-authored research in economics is partly (perhaps 20 percent) due to different research styles of scholars in different birth cohorts (of different ages). Most of the trend reflects profession-wide changes in research style. Older scholars show greater variation in their research styles than younger ones, who use similar numbers of co-authors in each published paper; but there are no differences across cohorts in scholars’ willingness to work with different coauthors. There are only small gender differences in the impacts of age on numbers of coauthors, but substantial differences on choice of coauthors.