We present and discuss a novel dataset on informal collaboration in financial economics, manually collected from more than 5,000 acknowledgement sections of published papers. We find that informal collaboration is the norm in financial economics, while generational differences in informal collaboration exist and reciprocity among collaborators prevails. Female researchers appear less often in acknowledgements than comparable male researchers. Information derived from networks of informal collaboration allows us to predict academic impact of both researchers and papers even better than information from co-author networks. Finally, we study the characteristics of the networks using various measures from network theory and characterize what determines a researcher’s position in it. The data presented here may help other researchers to shed light on an under-explored topic.

我们提出并讨论了有关金融经济学中非正式合作的新颖数据集，该数据集是从已发表论文的5,000多个致谢部分中手动收集的。我们发现非正式合作是金融经济学中的常态，而非正式合作中存在代际差异并且合作者之间互惠互利。与可比的男性研究人员相比，女性研究人员出现在答辩中的频率更低。从非正式合作网络中获得的信息使我们能够比共同作者网络中的信息更好地预测研究人员和论文的学术影响。最后，我们使用来自网络理论的各种方法来研究网络的特征，并描述决定研究人员在网络中的位置的因素。