GREDEG Economics Journal Club

Francesco Toni and Christian Vezil are glad to invite you to the third meeting of the Journal Club: “Dynamics of scientific evolution”.
 

The meeting will take place on Thursday 13th February, at 14:00 in the Picasso Room

The session will consist of a 30-minute presentation, followed by a 30-minute open discussion. Please note that this session will be held exclusively in person.
PhD students in Economics will be at the heart of this initiative, presenting papers that have significantly influenced their research areas. We encourage presentations on all Economics fields, including but not limited to Econometric Methods, Environmental Economics, Industrial Dynamics, Innovation, and Macroeconomics. While PhD students will lead the presentations, we warmly invite faculty members to attend and contribute their valuable expertise and insights to the discussions.

For this session, Pierre Boutros will present the paper:
"Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?" by Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua S. Graff Zivin. The abstract is provided below for your reference.

We will talk about the dynamics of scientific evolution by discussing a meticulous application of the difference-in-differences empirical framework. ABSTRACT: “Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?”
We examine how the premature death of eminent life scientists alters the vitality of their fields. While the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases after the death of a star scientist, the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases markedly. This surge in contributions from outsiders draws upon a different scientific corpus and is disproportionately likely to be highly cited. While outsiders appear reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive, the loss of a luminary provides an opportunity for fields to evolve in new directions that advance the frontier of knowledge.