The Rise of China and the Global Production of Scientific Knowledge

Abstract
We study China’s rapid rise as a new scientific superpower and its impact on the world’s top research universities over the period 1996-2016, asking what happens to science when a new dominant player enters the field. In a novel research design that can be applied to multiple scientific fields in a common framework, we expose different universities in each field to different degrees of the China shock, based on the topic composition of their initial publications together with the topic-specific growth of China’s research capacity over time. We find that net spillovers from China vary considerably across fields, e.g. significantly positive in chemistry but negative and statistically insignificant in mathematics. To explain the heterogeneous net effects, we explore competition, collaboration and complementarity as possible channels and assess their relative importance in different scientific fields. Joint paper with Tianrui Mu)