Teacher-directed scientific change: The case of the English Scientific Revolution

Abstract

While economic factors in directed technical and scientific change have been widely studied, the role of teacher-directed scientific change has received less attention. This paper studies teacher-directed scientific change for one of the largest changes in the direction of research, the Scientific Revolution. Specifically, the paper considers the case of the English Scientific Revolution at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge during 1600–1720. It argues that exposure to different teachers shaped students’ direction of research and can partly account for the successful trajectory of English science. For this, the paper introduces a novel dataset on the universe of 111,242 students at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and their publications. Using natural language processing, the paper derives a measure of researchers’ direction of research. To derive causal estimates of teacher-student effects, the paper uses an instrumental variable design that predicts students’ choice of college based on their home regions, a stacked differences-in-differences approach exploiting teachers leaving their college, and a natural experiment based on the expulsion of teachers following the English Civil War. The paper finds empirical evidence of teacher-directed change in the English Scientific Revolution. These results illustrate how teacher-directed change can contribute to paradigm change.

Julius Koschnick

Assistant Professor

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and part of the Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG) there. I earned my PhD in Economic History at the London School of Economics supervised by Max Schulze and Jeremiah Dittmar. My research interests include long-run growth, human capital formation, knowledge transmission, and natural language processing.