The Latest in Science and Innovation Policy Research
Creativity is a crucial ingredient of firms’ success. By promoting the creativity of their employees, firms can imagine new processes, products, and services that help them thrive in a changing world. Meanwhile, firms that miss this crucial ingredient stand clay-footed in their competition against innovative rivals. When prosperity depends on constant re-invention, how can firms… Read More »
In a study of the timing of over 200,000 publications by professors in Computer Science, we found strong evidence that there is no “typical” individual academic career trajectory. This overturns over half a century of research based on averages of the publication patterns of many professors. These results demonstrate the unpredictability of productivity over time… Read More »
The H-1B program allows skilled foreign-born individuals to work in the United States. The annual quota on new H-1B visa issuances fell from 195,000 to 65,000 for employees of most firms in fiscal year 2004. However, this cap did not apply to new employees of colleges, universities, and non-profit research institutions. Additionally, existing H-1B holders… Read More »
We examine how a change in the cost of access to knowledge influences the direction of inventive activity. To do this, we leverage an unanticipated and substantial reduction in the cost of motion sensing research technology that occurred with the introduction and subsequent hacking of the Microsoft Kinect system. To estimate whether this shock induces… Read More »
Scientists and policy-makers have long argued that public investments in science have practical applications. Using data on patents linked to U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants over a 27-year period, we provide a large-scale accounting of linkages between public research investments and subsequent patenting. We find that about 10% of NIH grants generate a… Read More »
This is a position statement from 50 linguistic scientists calling for radically increased reproducibility — especially the citation of primary data in publications — in linguistics.
We quantify the impact of scientific grant funding at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on patenting by pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. Our results show that NIH funding spurs the development of private-sector patents: a $10 million boost in NIH funding leads to a net increase of 2.7 patents. Though valuing patents is difficult, we… Read More »
One source of uncertainty in the patent system relates to the difficulty in identifying products that are protected with a patent. This paper studies the adoption by U.S. patentees of “virtual patent marketing” namely the online provision of constructive notice to the public that an article is patented. It proposes a simple model of the… Read More »
As academic careers become more competitive, junior scientists need to understand the value that mentorship brings to their success in academia. Previous research has found that, unsurprisingly, successful mentors tend to train successful students. But what characteristics of this relationship predict success, and how? We analyzed an open-access database of about 20,000 researchers who have… Read More »
Much research has suggested that independent boards of directors are more effective in reducing agency costs and improving firm governance. How they influence innovation is less clear. Relying on regulatory changes, we show that firms that transition to independent boards focus on more crowded and familiar areas of technology. They patent and claim more and… Read More »