Inbreeding and Productivity in Higher Education: Do Co-Authors Matter?

Academic inbreeding is a university practice of hiring its own graduates. Most research agree that it reduces research networks and limits the ability to get new knowledge and experience. Therefore, inbreeding usually regarded as a negative determinant of research productivity. The current paper compares research quantity and quality of inbred and non-inbred faculty and analyzes whether it is possible to raise productivity of inbreeds by stimulating co-authorship with academics from another universities. While inbreeding is typical for Russian academic environment, we use data on one of the leading Russian universities - Higher School of Economics (HSE). The initial sample collected includes 824 faculty members from economics and management departments of all HSE campuses at the beginning of 2016. We test different definitions of inbreeding, metrics of co-authorship and research output using the technique of a negative binomial regression. The results show that inbred HSE faculty are more productive in terms of research quantity measured both by total papers and papers written in English than non-inbred. We also find some evidence of the negative relationship between co-authors metrics and inbreeds productivity. However, having external co-authors increases research output across all examined factors for all HSE faculty, despite their place of graduation. Therefore, university management may stimulate research collaborations in order to influence productivity.