Person and Place Effects in Scientific Discovery

How much of a scientist’s research output is attributable to individual talent, and how much to the institution where they work? Because markets systematically under-provide fundamental science, the answer matters for how societies allocate the resources that substitute for missing market incentives, how the scientific community evaluates researchers for promotion and grants, and whether the current distribution of scientists across institutions maximizes knowledge production. We study this question using citation-weighted publications in leading life-science journals and a movers design that exploits variation in the output of nearly 40,000 scientists who change institutions. We find that 50 to 60 percent of the variation in a scientist’s research output is attributable to institutional factors. After correcting for limited mobility bias, we document positive assortative matching between scientists and institutions (a correlation of 0.3 between person and place effects), a necessary condition for maximizing aggregate knowledge production under the multiplicative structure of our model. Around two-thirds of the institutional effect is explained by the presence of star researchers. A scientist’s output responds to both the total output of their institution and its funding level, but not to the size of the local research cluster, suggesting that institutional effects operate through the human capital environment within an institution rather than through agglomeration or research funding alone. The symmetry of effects for upward and downward movers implies that institutional advantages do not permanently transfer to scientists who leave. These effects have not diminished despite technologies facilitating remote collaboration, are robust to detailed field-by-year controls, and raise the possibility that similar patterns extend to other areas of fundamental science.