The Role of Conferences on the Pathway to Academic Impact : Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We provide evidence for the effectiveness of conferences in promoting academic impact, by exploiting the cancellation -- due to `Hurricane Isaac' -- of the 2012 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting. We assembled a dataset of approximately 31,000 articles and quantified conference effects using difference-in-differences regressions. Within two years of being presented at the conference, articles receive an additional 15-17 downloads, and their likelihood of being cited increases by five percentage points. These advantages are permanent. We decompose these effects by authorship and provide an account of the underlying mechanisms.