The Mainstreaming of Marx: Measuring the Effect of the Russian Revolution on Karl Marx’s Influence
利用合成控制法，基于谷歌Ngram数据构建反事实，发现1917年俄国革命显著提升了马克思在学术界的引用率，其今日的学术地位很大程度上归因于这一政治事件。
Karl Marx’s high academic stature outside of economics diverges sharply from his peripheral influence within the discipline, particularly after nineteenth-century developments rendered the labor theory of value obsolete. We hypothesize that the 1917 Russian Revolution is responsible for elevating Marx into the academic mainstream. Using the synthetic control method, we construct a counterfactual for Marx’s citation patterns in Google Ngram data. This allows us to predict how often Marx would have been cited if the Russian Revolution had not happened. We find a significant treatment effect, meaning that Marx’s academic stature today owes a substantial debt to political happenstance.