This paper estimates the impact of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the ensuing Iran–Iraq War on Iran’s compliance with the rule of law, the protection of academic freedoms, and the quantity and composition of academic publications between 1978 and 1988. Using country-level panel data, a synthetic control method is employed to estimate the counterfactual trajectory of a post-1979 no-Revolution Iran. The results indicate that the aftermath of the establishment of the Islamic Republic, including events such as the Cultural Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War, led to a marked deterioration in the quality of Iranian institutions, as measured by four V-Dem indexes. This institutional decline was accompanied by reductions in both academic freedom and scientific knowledge production: after 1978, Iran published only between 10.9 percent and 31.4 percent of its expected research output. However, the evidence regarding research outreach and subject composition is mixed and statistically inconclusive. Robustness checks, including tests for treatment randomness, alternative estimations with an expanded donor pool and an expanded set of covariates, as well as temporal and spatial placebo exercises, support the reliability of the main findings.
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