Cross‐affiliation collaboration and power laws for research output of institutions: Evidence and theory from top three finance journals

Abstract

AbstractCross‐affiliation emerges as a new and fast‐developing means to promote collaboration in financial research. We find that the average number of affiliations reported per author in the top‐three finance journals increases steadily from 1.1 to 1.3 from 1995 to 2016. Scale‐free power laws characterize the resulting highly‐skewed distributions of top finance journal publications of worldwide institutions. We propose an explanation of the scale‐invariance, based on a network model featuring nonlinear growth and linear preferential attachment. The model indicates that success‐breeds‐success engenders 87% of total publications and hence the dispersion in research output, while accelerated growth of collaboration reduces the heterogeneity.