The Importance of Informal Intellectual Collaboration with Central Colleagues

Co-authorship is a form of formal intellectual collaboration in academia and is well researched. But most intellectual collaboration among academics, for example the provision of helpful commentary on a colleague's manuscript, is informal and not well understood. In this paper, we study social network effects in informal intellectual collaboration in financial economics. We reconstruct the social network of financial economics from formal and informal collaboration among financial economists using a novel and unique hand-collected dataset based on all publications in six leading journals in financial economics from 1997-2011. Our hypothesis is that informally collaborating with a colleague who is more central in the social network of financial economics improves the scientific impact of a research article. Treating the assignment of discussants at NBER summer institutes as quasi-natural experiment, we show that an increase in the discussant's eigenvector centrality by about 12.5% from the mean is associated with 2% more citations for an average research article.