Estructura y componentes

To sum up regarding EQ.1, PopPov has supported researchers working on PopPov issues, though many of these were already working on these topics or, in the case of the fellows, intended to work on them; it is difficult to know the counterfactual of how many of these researchers would have worked on PopPov topics (and have done the amount of research on them that they did) had they not received PopPov support. The program has not brought many new senior researchers into the field. This is partly the result of the design because the initial competition was by invitation only to selected people already in the field. However, there have been a few notable exceptions. The program appears to have enabled researchers already in the field to do more than they may have been able to do without PopPov funding (e.g., additional fieldwork).

It has also increased the number of European researchers working on population, health, and development issues, although, as will be seen ahead, many of these are not doing the kind of economic demography research that the CGD working group advocated.

It is noteworthy that the majority of the doctoral fellows funded by PopPov are econo- mists. The fellows program is viewed by many as PopPov’s biggest success. It has reached many who would not have been eligible otherwise for dissertation funding. Many of the fellows are continuing to do research on PopPov topics. The newly instituted alumni grants for fellows are helping several of them do this.

However, as will be seen ahead, a considerable amount of PopPov support for research grants has gone to non-economists, and the majority of the journal articles so far produced with project funding have been in non-economic journals.

Except at the doctoral level for U.S.-based students, instead of doing the hard work of really growing the field by bringing in new faces and training folks who most need it, PopPov generally took the route of supporting things that were easier and less risky.

IV.B. Evaluation Question 2: What Contribution Has PopPov Research Made to the Evidence Base Regarding Relationships Between Demographic

Change or Behavior and Economic Outcomes?

In the previous section, we investigated the extent to which the field was built up, mainly in terms of the number of people in it, their participation in high-level conferences, and the fund- ing being invested to study PopPov research questions. In this section, we evaluate the knowl- edge output so generated. In particular, we address the following subquestions:

• EQ.2.1. To what extent has the research conducted for PopPov addressed each of the four research questions noted above (which came from the CGD working group)?

• EQ.2.2. To what extent have new findings come from PopPov research? Has knowledge been added about a particular country or setting? Were new relationships were investi- gated?

• EQ.2.3. To what extent has PopPov research been done in underinvestigated areas, par- ticularly in SSA?

• EQ.2.4. Were new techniques, metrics, or survey methodologies used? Were new data collected?

• EQ.2.5. What is the quality of research done under PopPov, as judged by the types of publications that have resulted?

To conduct these analyses, we draw mainly on the SOPP report and the EDPP database described in Section III. EDPP documents the following for each paper: funder; geographic setting for the research; nationality and discipline of the grantee; whether fellow or research grantee; year the project was funded; whether new data were collected and type of data and methods used in the research; which of the four research questions the research addressed;

and, if published in a journal, the name of the journal, the main type of audience that journal reaches, and the impact factor (IF) of the journal (defined ahead).7

As of August 2013, we had identified 259 papers supported by PopPov—an impressive number. Around 40 percent of these have been published in journals (n = 68) or as chapters in books (n = 8) or are under journal review (n = 27). The rest are available as working papers (95), dissertations (39), or are unpublished (22). Some of the latter group are earlier versions of the papers in the former group. For this reason, to avoid double-counting, in this section, we sometimes present statistics only for the former group. Table IV.1 shows that, of the 103 jour- nal articles, book chapters, and papers under review at journals, 30 are by fellows and 73 are for research grantees’ projects.

We have looked at how the types of publications differ by the year when funding was first received but have not seen much evidence of a delay in getting research published (or at least submitted to journals) for grantees whose funding has ended. For example, the percentage of papers by graduated fellows that is published or under review varies little between earlier and later cohorts. As seen earlier, fellows are more likely to have papers under review, while grant- ees have more papers already published. (This may partly reflect the fact that the fellowship program began several years after the grant program.)

We now turn to the five subquestions.

7 _{An academic journal’s IF is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in the jour-} nal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals with higher IFs deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Caution has been advised in using IFs to compare across fields (Amin and Mabe, 2000). We use two-year IFs, which are measured as the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the preceding two years. Not all journals have IFs, as can be seen in Table IV.11.

Citation counts, e.g., using article databases, such as Web of Science, is another metric sometimes used to assess impact; however, given the fact that many PopPov projects only recently yielded findings and given the lags in publication, we decided that these would not be very useful for this case because there has not been sufficient time for the citation record to accumulate.

Table IV.1

Papers Published with PopPov Support, by Type of Paper and Whether for Fellowship or Research- Project Grants

Type of Paper Total Fellows Research Grantees

Journal article 68 (26%) 10 (9%) 58 (41%)

Book chapter 8 (3%) 1 (1%) 7 (5%)

Under journal review 27 (10%) 19 (16%) 8 (6%) Working paper (including job market papers) 95 (37%) 44 (38%) 51 (36%)

Dissertation 39 (15%) 39 (34%) n.a.

none of the above (unpublished or no information) 22 (8%) 3 (3%) 19 (13%)

total 259 (100%) 116 (100%) 143 (100%)

SoURCE: EDPP.

IV.B.1. To What Extent Has the Research Conducted for PopPov Addressed Each of the Four