Replication Data for: Testing the Bounds of the Knowledge Burden Hypothesis: The Fall of the Iron Curtain and Collaboration in Mathematics

Prior literature explains increasing team-sizes in academic collaboration as a result of the knowledge burden hypothesis, which broadly asserts that the continuously accumulating stock of scientific knowledge requires increased specialization in academic work. In this paper, we replicate Agrawal et al. (2016)’s analysis of the differential increases in team-sizes of Soviet-rich and Soviet-poor subfields of theoretical mathematics after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We question the underlying parallel trends assumption of existing analysis and examine non-linear models to potentially explain the observed phenomena. In addition, we integrate previously omitted factors into the analysis such as subfield popularity. Overall, our analysis invites potential for factors other than the knowledge burden hypothesis to explain differential increases in team-size in theoretical mathematics. We conclude with discussion of implications of our findings.