Brad M. Barber is Professor of Finance at the University of California Davis Graduate School of Management; Wei Jiang is Arthur F. Burns Professor of Free and Competitive Enterprise in the Finance Division at Columbia Business School; and Adair Morse is Associate Professor of Finance at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business. This post is based on a recent paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, authored by Mr. Barber, Ms. Jiang, Ms. Morse; Manju Puri, J. B. Fuqua Professor of Finance at Duke University Fuqua School of Business; Heather E. Tookes, Professor of Finance at Yale School of Management; and Ingrid M. Werner, Martin and Andrew Murrer Professor in Finance at The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business.
Based on a survey of American Finance Association members in late 2020, this study explores disparate impacts of COVID-19 on research productivity and tests the main channels that could have contributed to the findings. We received 1,440 responses, 85.4% of which are from faculty members. Most of the survey responses are reported in Likert scales (from 1 to 5), which is accommodated by ordered logistic models. Because the pandemic hit everyone by complete surprise, and because the regressors in our models represent mostly pre-existing characteristics, endogeneity should not be a major concern for most of the inferences we made.
During the pandemic, 78.1% of faculty respondents report a decrease in research productivity and 60% report spending less time on research, while 14.5% of faculty report an increase in research productivity and 21.5% report spending more time on research. The variation in research effects relates to predetermined factors—family structure and gender. Research productivity of women and faculty with children, especially very young children (ages 0 to 5), is particularly negatively impacted by the pandemic, and these two factors appear to work independently without a significant interaction effect. Thus, the pandemic could set back recent efforts to ameliorate the gender disparity in academic finance. Also negatively impacted are junior faculty of both genders, as they are more likely to have young children and experience professional isolation. Because junior faculty are the group for whom current research productivity will have the greatest impact on future career outcomes, the impact of these distortions may have profound effects on research and on the profession as a whole.
