October 2008

Science as Team Sport
The Large Hadron Collider, accelerating subatomic particles to light speed before crashing them together in spectacular fashion 100 meters beneath the Franco-Swiss border, unites thousands of physicists and engineers from dozens of nations and hundreds of universities in one of the world’s largest scientific collaborations. But calculus, a cornerstone of mathematics that is wielded en masse in the collider’s humming tunnels and glowing control rooms, was developed by just two men, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Sir Isaac Newton, each of whom worked independently in the latter half of the 17th century.

Benjamin F. Jones

Stefan Wuchty

Brian Uzzi

June 2007

Do Leaders Matter?
The degree to which leaders matter is an old and unsettled question. Despite centuries of thought and study, this issue remains divisive. What none can doubt, however, is this: leaders die. And when they do, national economies can change in major, unexpected ways, according to research by Benjamin Jones, assistant professor of management and strategy at Kellogg, and his colleague Benjamin Olken (Harvard Society of Fellows). Their report in The Quarterly Journal of Economics provides clear evidence that unpredictable changes in a country’s leadership, due to the executive’s death by accident or illness, can trigger changes in gross domestic product (GDP) growth. In this new light, the grip of massive political institutions on economies appears much less commanding than was previously thought.

Benjamin F. Jones

Benjamin A. Olken