Teacher Influence in Music Composition since 1450: A Replication of Borowiecki (2022)
Borowiecki (2022) studies the influence of teachers on the style of their students in the domain of musical composition. The author finds that realized student-teacher pairs are on average 0.2-0.3 standard deviations more similar to unrealized, but possible, studentteacher pairs. In this report we provide the results of our replication of Borowiecki (2022).
We direct our attention to the following tasks: 1) Replicating the outcome variables used in the paper, starting from the raw data, and generating alternative measures of similarity between students and teachers 2) Testing the validity of the random teacher-student pairing, a key assumption for the validity of the estimation strategy employed in the paper. We can replicate most of the outcome variables, but not all of them, due to incomplete raw data. Our alternative measures of similarity confirm the robustness of the original results. We find significantly different characteristics between paired and unpaired students, suggesting that matching between students and teachers does not occur randomly. However, controlling for these characteristics in the main regressions leads to quantitatively similar results to the ones reported in the original paper.