Cheap airfares fuel scientific partnerships
By 
Rebecca Trager2018-04-05T11:00:00
Chemistry collaborations jump 36% when US discount airline establishes a new route, international team finds
A dramatic reduction in air travel costs is helping to fuel scientific collaboration in the US, according to research presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference at the University of Sussex in late March.
An international team found that the introduction of cheap airfares translates into a 50% increase in research partnerships between two regions, and that surge is closer to 80% when output is weighted by citations. The researchers – Christian Fons-Rosen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ramón y Cajal from Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, and Patrick Gaulé from Cerge-EI in in Prague – concluded that the additional collaborations facilitated by the lower airfares are of high quality.