The Rise of China and the Global Production of Scientific Knowledge” with Tianrui Mu

Abstract:

Scientific progress is more important than ever in tackling many challenges the world faces. Recently, the momentum for new developments has shifted eastward, in particular as China has dramatically expanded its research capacity and scientific output. Today, China trails only the US as the world’s leading producer of high-quality scientific research. In this paper, we study how the rapid ascent of China as a new research power has affected worldwide production of scientific knowledge, focusing on the evolution of scientific publications at world-leading universities during 1996-2016 and exploiting patterns of research collaborations between institutions. We find that as China’s research capacity expands, universities that have stronger historical links to China collaborate substantially more with China and also produce more scientific output in general, relative to those with weaker links. These effects are heterogeneous across research fields and also across the quality of research publications. We explore the role of resource augmentation and knowledge spillover in explaining these findings.