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

Cross-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.