This paper examines the impact of contracting complementarity across product development systems in the automobile industry. While most empirical research on contracting assumes that each governance choice is independent of each other, cross-system integration and incentive problems within product development suggest the potential for complementarities across contracting choices within the firm. This paper develops and implements an instrumental variables estimator which allows us to distinguish contracting complementarity from firm-level fixed effects in governance choice. Taking advantage of system-level determinants of vertical integration to calculate instruments for system-to-system contracting complementarity, we establish three findings. First, contracting choices are “clustered”: the probability of vertical integration for each automobile system increases in number of other systems that are vertically integrated. Second, instrumental variables and reduced-form estimates suggest that contracting complementarity, rather than unobserved firm-level factors, are the drivers of this correlation. Finally, the degree of correlation in governance is sensitive to the underlying contracting and technology environment, and contracting complementarity seems to be highest for those interactions where integration and coordination are most critical. While we interpret these findings cautiously, the results suggest that assuming away contracting complementarity may be problematic in contexts where coordination activities are both important and difficult to monitor.

We develop an overlapping generation model of Open Science where researchers choose whether to draw upon prior knowledge and whether to disclose their research output. Researchers who do not disclose knowledge receive a private benefit but lose the benefits of citations by the next generation. We show that ‘Science’ and ‘No Science’ are both potential equilibrium. Science as an equilibrium depends on factors such as certifying the fidelity or truth-value of that knowledge or maintaining an effective system for monitoring and punishing plagiarism. Moreover, it is more difficult to establish Science as equilibrium than to maintain that equilibrium once it is established in the first place.

This paper examines the impact of vertical integration on the dynamics of performance in the context of automobile product development. Building on recent work in organizational economics and strategy, we examine a number of detailed case studies to evaluate the relationship between vertical integration and different performance margins. On the one hand, outsourcing facilitates access to cutting-edge technology and the use of high-powered performance contracts. On the other hand, vertical integration allows firms to respond to adapt to unforeseen contingencies and customer feedback, maintain more balanced incentives over the product lifecycle, and develop firm-specific capabilities over time. Together, these effects highlight a crucial dynamic tradeoff: while outsourcing will be associated with higher levels of initial performance, vertical integration will be associated with a higher rate of performance improvement over the product lifecycle. We test these ideas with detailed data from the luxury segment of the global automobile industry. The data combine detailed performance measures over time with nuanced measures of the extent of vertical integration, as well as measures of the contracting and technology environment. We establish four key results. First, initial performance is declining in the level of vertical integration. Second, the level of performance improvement is significantly increasing in the level of vertical integration. Moreover, even after controlling for other factors impacting performance, the magnitude of these two effects are roughly identical – there is no relationship between vertical integration and “overall” performance. Finally, taking advantage of outsourcing during the early part of the product lifecycle and internal development during the latter years of the lifecycle depends on the institutional and strategic environment. For example, the long-term benefits to vertical integration are erased for those firms with a strong union presence. Overall, the empirical findings highlight that the vertical integration decision reflects a dynamic strategic tradeoff between short-term performance and the potential for improvement over time.

This paper considers the impact of the intellectual property (IP) system on the timing of cooperation/licensing by start-up technology entrepreneurs. If the market for technology licenses is efficient, the timing of licensing is independent of the patent grant date, and productive efficiency considerations will result in licensing as early as possible after invention. In contrast, the need for disclosure of unprotected knowledge on the part of the inventor, asymmetric information between the licensor and potential licensees, or search costs may retard efficient technology transfer. In these cases, the actual grant of a patent may facilitate trade in the market for ideas by establishing the scope of IP rights. Employing a dataset which combines information about the timing of patent grants and cooperative licensing, we find that pre-grant licensing is quite common, occurring in about 40% of our sample; moreover, the hazard rate for achieving a cooperative licensing agreement increases significantly with the granting of formal IP rights. Finally, the importance of a patent grant for licensing depends on the strategic environment in which the firm operates. When productive efficiency effects are important (as when technology cycle times are short), or when alternative mechanisms such as reputation may serve to mitigate expropriation concerns or reduce search costs, patent grants are not as important. The findings suggest that imperfections in the market for ideas may be important, and that formal IP rights may facilitate gains from technological trade.

While the potential for intellectual property rights to inhibit the diffusion of scientific knowledge is at the heart of several contemporary policy debates, evidence for the “anticommons” hypothesis has been anecdotal. This paper develops and implements an empirical test for the anticommons effect exploiting two aspects of the process of disclosing and protecting scientific knowledge: (a) scientific knowledge receiving formal IP often appears also in the form of scientific research articles (a phenomena we refer to as a “patent-paper pair”) and (b) patents are granted with a substantial lag, often many years after the knowledge is initially disclosed through paper publication. The knowledge associated with a patent-paper pair therefore diffuses within two distinct intellectual property environments – one associated with the pre-grant period and another after formal IP rights are granted. Relative to the expected citation pattern for publications with a given quality level, the anticommons theory predicts that the citation rate to a scientific publication should fall after formal IP rights associated with that publication are granted. Employing a differences-in-differences estimator for 169 patent-paper pairs (and including a control group of other publications from the same journal for which no patent is granted), we find evidence for a quantitatively modest but statistically significant anticommons effect. While publications linked to patent grants are associated with a higher overall citation rate, the citation rate after the patent grant declines by between 9 and 17%. This decline becomes more pronounced with the number of years elapsed since the date of the patent grant, and is particularly salient for articles authored by researchers with public sector affiliations. While the anticommons effect may have an empirical basis, the size of the may be small enough to ameliorate at least some public policy concerns.

This paper evaluates the relationship between wages and the scientific orientation of R&D organizations. Firms who adopt a science-oriented research approach (i.e., Science) allow their researchers to publish in the “public” scientific literature, resulting in knowledge spillovers, and pursue individual research agendas, decreasing coordination across a firm’s research projects. Because Science has been associated with a boost in R&D productivity and overall firm performance, the economic logic underlying the adoption of Science is a key puzzle in the economics of technological change. This paper proposes two potential explanations: a “taste” for Science on the part of researchers (a Preference effect) and R&D productivity gains arising from earlier access to discoveries by external (often university-based) scientists (a Productivity effect). The equilibrium relationship between wages and Science reflects the relative salience of these effects: the Preference effect contributes to a negative compensating differential while the Productivity effect raises the possibility of rent-sharing between firms and researchers. Moreover, because the value of participating in Science is increasing in the prestige of researchers, Science will tend to be adopted by firms who employ higher-quality researchers; this correlation between the adoption of Science and researcher quality likely results in bias in cross-sectional productivity estimates and hedonic wage studies. This paper implements a novel empirical method, based on the structure of professional labor markets, to substantially overcome these biases. Specifically, prior to accepting a specific job offer, many scientists receive multiple job offers, making it possible to calculate the wage-Science curve for individual scientists, controlling for their ability level. This field-based methodology is applied to a sample of postdoctoral biologists. The results suggest a strong negative relationship between wages and Science. For example, firms who allow their employees to publish extract, on average, over a 20% wage discount. The results are robust to restricting the sample to non-academic job offers, but the findings depend critically on the inclusion of the researcher fixed effects. The paper’s conclusion, then, is that, conditional on scientific ability, scientists do indeed pay to be scientists. Journal of Economic Literature Classification: Nonwage Labor Costs and Benefits (J32); Professional Labor Markets and Occupations (J44); Industry Studies, Drugs (L65); Innovation and Invention (O31); Management of R&D (O32).

This paper offers a framework for understanding patterns of competitive interaction between technology entrepreneurs and more established firms. Whether start-firms compete or cooperate with more established firms depends on the “market for ideas.” When a market for ideas functions efficiently, start-up firms reinforce established sources of market power; when markets for ideas fail, industries are subject to the gale of creative destruction. Our framework suggests that which pattern is more likely depends on the ability of start-ups to avoid expropriation and on the degree to which commercialization prospects are enhanced by exploiting incumbent complementary assets.

This paper evaluates whether the relative concentration of funding for small, research-oriented firms in a small number of high-tech industries is related to the differences across industries in the level of appropriability or capital constraints facing small firms. To do so, we exploit a novel test based on the relationship between industry-level private venture financing and the performance of government-subsidized R&D projects in those sectors. If the government funds projects on the margin (as it should under an optimal subsidy regime) and industries only differ in terms of the level of appropriability, then private funding and subsidized project performance are positively correlated. Conversely, if industries only differ in terms of the level of capital constraints, this correlation is negative. Our principal empirical result is that project-level performance is highest for those technologies that are in industrial segments that attract high rates of venture capital investment. This result suggests that industrial sectors differ in the degree of appropriability for research-oriented small businesses and that variation in the appropriability regime helps explain the concentrated nature of venture capital activity in the economy.

Motivated by differences in R&D productivity across advanced economies, this paper presents an empirical examination of the determinants of country-level production of international patents. We introduce a novel framework based on the concept of national innovative capacity. National innovative capacity is the ability of a country to produce and commercialize a flow of innovative technology over the long term. National innovative capacity depends on the strength of a nation’s common innovation infrastructure (cross-cutting factors which contribute broadly to innovativeness throughout the economy), the environment for innovation in its leading industrial clusters, and the strength of linkages between these two areas. We use this framework to guide our empirical exploration into the determinants of country-level R&D productivity, specifically examining the relationship between international patenting (patenting by foreign countries in the United States) and variables associated with the national innovative capacity framework. While acknowledging important measurement issues arising from the use of patent data, we provide evidence for several findings. First, the production function for international patents is well-characterized by a small but nuanced set of observable factors, including R&D manpower and spending, aggregate policy choices such as the extent of IP protection and openness to international trade, the share of research performed by the academic sector and funded by the private sector, and the degree of technological specialization. As well, international patenting productivity depends on each individual country’s knowledge “stock.” Further, the predicted level of national innovative capacity impacts on more downstream commercialization and diffusion activities (such as achieving a high market share of high-technology export markets). Finally, there has been convergence among OECD countries in terms of the estimated level of innovative capacity over the past quarter century. Journal of Economic Literature Classification: Technological Change (O3); Technological Change: Choices and Consequences (O33); Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity: Comparative Studies (O57).

This paper analyzes the productivity of information technology in emergency response systems. “Enhanced 911” (E911) is information technology that links caller identification to a location database and so speeds up emergency response. We assess the impact of E911 on health outcomes using Pennsylvania ambulance and hospital records between 1994 and 1996, a period of substantial adoption. We find that, as a result of E911 adoption, patient health measured at the time of ambulance arrival improves, suggesting that E911 speeds up emergency response. Further analysis using hospital discharge data shows that E911 reduces mortality and hospital costs.

This paper examines the determinants of commercialization strategy for start-up innovators. We examine whether the returns on innovation are earned through product market competition versus cooperation with established firms (through licensing, alliances or acquisition). Our hypotheses are that the relative returns to cooperation are increasing in (a) control over intellectual property rights, (b) low transaction costs and (c) sunk costs associated with product market entry. Using a novel dataset of the commercialization strategies of start-up innovators, our results suggest that the pro-competitive impact of start-up innovation – the gale of creative destruction – depends on imperfections in the market for ideas.

Innovation has become the defining challenge for global competitiveness. To manage it well, companies must harness the power of location in creating and commercializing new ideas.

This paper analyzes the relationship between incumbency and innovative activity in the context of a model of technological competition in which technologically successful entrants are able to license their innovation to (or be acquired by) an incumbent. That such a sale ought to take place is natural since the post-innovation monopoly profits are greater than the sum of duopoly profits. The model integrates insights about the economic determinants of licensing fees (such as the size of knowledge spillovers or the sunk costs of product market entry) into the canonical model of technological competition under uncertainty. In so doing, we identify three key findings about how bargaining power during licensing negotiations impacts the incentives to engage in R&D. First, since an incumbent’s threat to engage in imitative R&D during negotiations increases their bargaining power, our model identifies a purely strategic incentive for incumbents to develop an R&D capability. Second, incumbents research more intensively than entrants as long as (and only if) their “willingness-to-pay” for the innovation exceeds that of the entrant, a condition which depends critically on the expected size of the licensing fee. Third, when the expected licensing fee is sufficiently low, the incumbent considers entrant R&D a strategic substitute for in-house research. This stands in contrast to the prediction of strategic complementarity which arise in patent races where licensing is not allowed.

This essay explores the impact of intellectual property-based antitrust remedies in high-techology markets characterized by technological standardization and strong intellectual property for first movers. Our motivation is the consent decree employed in the 1991 software industry merger of Borland International, Inc. and Ashton-Tate Corporation (Borland). Apparently concerned that the merged entity’s simultaneous control over intellectual property and technology standards would limit competition after the merger, the DOJ conditioned consummation of the merger on the relinquishment of certain intellectual property claims. Our analysis suggests three Amarkers@ for identifying circumstances where IP expropriation as exercised in Borland may be appropriate: (1) when both the technological standard and the assignment of IP rights are potentially arbitrary; (2) when there exists a conflict between early and later-generation innovators over the allocation of IP rights; and (3) when standard-setting results from Awinner-take-all@ competition. We also suggest that the form of IP expropriation may be important in designing an effective remedy: whereas compulsory licensing encourages price-based competition, forfeiture tends to encourage innovation-based competition. We use this framework to evaluate the Borland remedy and its aftermath. In addition to some more subtle results, we conclude that the remedy effectively preserved price and innovation competition, and that the case highlights the potential for using intellectual property-based remedies to preserve innovation-based competition in markets characterized by technological standards.

Motivated by R&D differences across countries, we evaluates the determinants of country-level international patenting. Our framework is built on the concept of national innovative capacity. Our results suggest that (a) patenting is characterized by a small but nuanced set of observable economic factors which may be affected by public policy and (b) the OECD has experienced substantial convergence in natinoal innovative capacity over the past quarter century.

This paper begins to reconcile competing perspectives on the origins of competitive advantage by examining the adoption of 'science-driven' drug discovery, a performance-enhancing organizational practice. Science-driven drug discovery diffused slowly, allowing us to disentangle alternativel theories of organizational heterogeneity. Adoption is driven by initial conditions, time-varying internal and external environmental conditions, and convergence (firms positioned least favorably adopt most aggressively). While accounting for initial conditions is critical, managers are sensitive to idiosyncratic environmental cues. The origins of competitive advantage may therefore lie in the ability to identify and respond to environmental cues well in advance of observing performance-oriented pay-offs.

Biotechnology promises to provide tremendous value through science-driven innovation. The record of competitive advantage in biotechnology, however, is mixed. Despite a continuing stream of radical innovation and success for a number of “idea factories,” start-up biotechnology firms have yet to overturn the market leadership of established pharmaceutical or agricultural chemical companies. These competitive dynamics result from the commercialization environment facing most biotechnology firms. Specifically, the availability of intellectual property, combined with expertise in regulation and distribution on the part of established players, makes transactions in the “market for ideas” an effective commercialization strategy for most biotechnology innovation. Though some analysts bemoan biotechnology companies’ lack of success in integrating forward and competing with established firms, long-term competitive advantage for most biotechnology firms may best be ensured by developing competencies at idea development alongside strategic cooperation with commercialization partners.

We investigate the impact of knowledge hubs on cumulative knowledge production in the life sciences. Knowledge hubs are institutions which collect, certify, and then offer access to knowledge in technical and scientific communities. Relative to the more traditional “peer-to-peer” network, knowledge hubs offer scale and scope economies, a higher degree of certification, independent access, and credible long-term storage capacity. Each of these factors contributes to the role that knowledge hubs play in establishing and growing the “knowledge stock” in a specific technological area, the key factor in keeping diminishing returns to R&D at bay. Because knowledge hubs involve free-riding and reduce the opportunities for rent extraction, efficient knowledge hubs may not arise without coordinated non-market cooperation among members of a technological community. We investigate these ideas in the context of biological resource centers, a key knowledge hub in life sciences research. Employing a differences-in-differences approach on a dataset that links specific journal articles to specific deposits within a biological resource center, we find strong support that biological resource centers play a key role in amplifying the impact of the knowledge which is deposited within it. Moreover, the impact of biological resource centers seems to increase with the “vintage” of the knowledge under consideration and has increased substantially during the 1990s.

This paper evaluates the impact of restrictions on embryonic stem cell use in US Federally funded scientific research on the geography of scientific discovery. In order for localized knowledge spillovers to be translated into sustained scientific leadership, researchers in close proximity to an original discovery must be able to exploit that discovery more rapidly and more intensively than distant researchers. Local researchers must be able to take scientific advantage of a discovery more quickly than their more distant competitors are able to catch up. This paper exploits an exogenous shock to the process of step-by-step scientific discovery to assess the sensitivity of regional scientific agglomeration to a temporary shift in the knowledge production process. Specifically, this paper examines the impact of the Bush Administration’s policy of limiting the scope of Federally funded human embryonic stem cell research to experiments using a already existing stem cell lines. Over the past several years, research into the biological foundations of stem cells has been described by biologists as one of the most promising areas of scientific progress, with rapid advances using both embryonic and non-embryonic stem cells, human as well as non-human sources. Moreover, at least in the initial period after the key discoveries of the 1990s, stem cell research has tended to be geographically localized, with a small number of locations and institutions accounting for a very large fraction of the overall discoveries. In August, 2001, the Bush Administration enacted a policy that placed a subtle but substantive restriction on the freedom of Federally funded researchers; it limited experiments using human embryonic stem cells and conducted with Federal funds to only a small number of possible stem cell lines that had been developed prior to the date of the policy change. While researchers were free to use these specific stem cell lines or to seek alternative funding sources, the policy seems to have placed significant restrictions on academic researchers dependent on Federal funding, and that adapting to the policy required a period of adjustment and exploration. Observers have suggested that this unexpected delay in the activity of those at the scientific frontier provided an opportunity for less well-positioned researchers to catch up and for equally well-positioned researchers to forge ahead. To test the impact of the policy, we have assembled a dataset of the citations to all publications through the end of 2004 which cite a set of 80 seminal stem cell articles published in the mid-to-late 1990s. While some of these publications are primarily focused on human embryonic stem cell research, others are linked to non-human or non-embryonic stem cell research unaffected by the Bush stem cell policy. As well, we have gathered publication information for a set of control group publications in areas of life sciences research unaffected by US stem cell policy entirely. For each follow-on publication we have information about the location and institutional affiliation of the researchers, as well as other publication and researcher characteristics. Our empirical examination focuses on whether the geographic pattern of human embryonic stem cell research after the Bush stem cell policy decision differs significantly from the pattern of regional agglomeration/dispersion realized by researchers using non-human and/or non-embryonic stem cell lines. Preliminary analysis of a subset of the data suggests that human embryonic stem cell research has experienced a rapid and significant shift in its level of geographic dispersion -- a much higher share of frontier discoveries take place outside of the United States, and the degree of regional dispersion within the United States has increased as well. While we must still undertake a complete analysis of the entire dataset, these very preliminary results suggest that the foundations for regional and national knowledge spillovers may be quite fragile to variation in the public policy environment, and that even modest restrictions on academic freedom for leading researchers may allow competing research groups to catch up in a relatively short period of time.

Cumulative scientific research depends on access to inputs associated with prior discoveries, such as databases, research tools and models, and organic materials. While follow-on researchers may be able to limit the price of access to these inputs to providing an appropriate citation, input developers may seek to use their control rights over such inputs to extract additional concessions from follow-on researchers, including co-authorship of follow-on research articles. By obtaining formal intellectual property rights over knowledge disclosed in scientific publications, input developers may seek to enhance their bargaining power in the market for scientific collaboration. One implication of such rent-seeking is the creation of “patent-paper pairs,” in which a given discovery is instantiated as both a scientific research article and in the form of a patent disclosure. This paper investigates the impact of these IP rights on the market for scientific collaboration. To do so, we exploit the fact that patents are granted with a substantial lag, often many years after the knowledge is initially disclosed through paper publication. Since patent applicants cannot enforce rights over knowledge until their patents are actually granted, authors of patent-paper pairs experience an enhancement in their bargaining power with potential collaborators after a patent is granted. To evaluate the equilibrium implications of these shifts in bargaining power, we examine how the pattern of scientific citations to a research article changes after patent rights over the knowledge in that article are granted. Employing a differences-in-differences estimator for more than 150 patent-paper pairs (and including a control group of publications from the same journal for which no patent is granted), we find evidence that patent grant results in a reduction in the number of citations from “independent” research teams, an increase in citations associated with “collaborative” research teams, and a reduction in the overall “quality: of follow-on research publications (they are published in lower quality journals). These shifts are particularly important for follow-on articles published by public sector authors. Overall, the evidence suggests that scientists use intellectual property to enhance their market power in the market for scientific collaboration.

This paper studies alternative empirical strategies for estimating the effects of organizational design practices on performance, as well as the factors which determine organizational design, in a cross-section of firms. Our economic model is based on a firm where multiple organizational design practices are endogenously determined, and these organizational design practices affect output through an “organizational design production function.” The econometric model includes unobserved exogenous variation in the costs and returns to each of the individual practices. The model is used to evaluate how different econometric strategies for testing theories about complementarity can be interpreted under alternative assumptions about the economic and statistical environment. We identify plausible hypotheses about the joint distribution of the unobservables under which several different approaches from the existing literature will yield biased and inconsistent estimates. We show that the sign of the bias depends on two factors: whether the organizational design practices are complements, and the correlation between the unobserved returns to each practice. We find several sets of conditions under which the sign of the bias can be determined, and we provide economic interpretations. Our analysis shows that for a particular set of hypotheses, a variety of different procedures may all yield qualitatively similar biases, presenting a challenge for the identification of complementarity. We then propose a structural approach, which is based on a system of simultaneous equations describing productivity and the demand for organizational design practices. As long as exogenous variables are observed which are uncorrelated with the unobserved returns to practices, the structural parameters are identified, yielding consistent tests for complementarity as well as the cross-equation restrictions implied by static optimization of the organization’s profit function.

When effort is multi-dimensional, firms will optimally “balance” the provision of incentives. Setting high-powered incentives along one dimension raises the returns to providing high-powered incentives along other dimensions which compete for the worker’s effort and/or attention (Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1991). We test for this effect in the context of for-profit pharmaceutical laboratories using detailed data on individual research programs. Consistent with this complementarity hypothesis, there is both cross-sectional and time-series evidence that firms providing strong promotion-based incentives for scientists to invest in basic research are more likely to provide strong incentives to supply effort towards applied research.

This paper estimates the parameters of the “ideas” production function central to recent models of economic growth. We do so by evaluating the determinants of “international” patenting rates across the OECD, where an international patent is one granted by the U.S. patent office to a foreign establishment. Taking advantage of variation in the flow of ideas produced by different countries over time, we provide evidence for three main findings. First, at the level of the production of international patents, country-level R&D productivity increases proportionally with the stock of ideas already discovered, a key parametric restriction associated with the Romer model of ideas-driven growth (Romer, 1990; Jones, 1995). Second, we find that ideas productivity in a given country is constant or declining in the worldwide stock of ideas. Ideas production by other countries raises the bar for producing new-to-the-world technology domestically, outweighing the positive effects of international knowledge spillovers. Finally, ideas productivity is concave in the size of the R&D workforce and the linkage between ideas production and overall productivity growth is small. These results suggest that while the parametric restrictions required to generate endogenous technological change may be satisfied for individual economies, the growth rate associated with such effects may be modest. There seems to be a gap between the the sustained production of ideas by advanced economies and the ability to translate ideas into measured productivity growth.

This paper studies the consequences of physician authority on pharmaceutical prescribing. Physicians engage in a costly process of "matching" patients to the drug which most suits their particular conditions and characteristics. The relative efficiency of this matching process results from the diagnostic skill of the physician along with the investments made by the doctor in learning about different drugs. While the underlying level of physician skill or knowledge cannot be observed, differences among physicians in terms of these attributes are reflected in their prescribing behavior. We provide evidence for two major findings regarding the exercise of physician authority in this context. First, there is substantial variation in the degree to which physician prescribing is concentrated (i.e., some physicians prescribe a more diverse portfolio of drugs than others). Second, this concentration is correlated with observable drug characteristics. In particular, concentrated prescribers tend to prescribe drugs with high levels of advertising, low prices, and high (lagged) market shares. Our empirical results provide evidence for the importance of both physician effort and diagnostic ability in the prescribing process. In particular, physicians who differentiate among their patients more finely are more likely to have less concentrated prescribing portfolios and to be less sensitive to information sources which promote the use of drugs for the "average" patient.

This handbook chapter consdiders the endogeneity of science and its interrelationship with technology and economic growth. It will appear in the Hanbook of the Economics of Technological Change published by Elsevier.

While entrepreneurship is central to economic growth, the role of entrepreneurship in prosperity has only recently begun to be evaluated systematically. This short essay considers the special role played by entrepreneurship in promoting economic experimentation, including its role in promoting technological experiments, market experiments, and organizational experiments. By focusing on the role of entrepreneurship in enhancing the diversity and learning of an economy, the economic experiments approach provides a more solid foundation for policy analysis and managerial practice.

This essay assesses the economic impact of biological resource centers (BRCs), focusing on the ability of BRCs to impact the efficiency and cumulativeness of the production of scientific and technological knowledge. As an economic institution, BRCs play a critical and positive role in the process of cumulative knowledge production. BRCs serve as a key ingredient in the growth of scientific and technological knowledge, which is in turn at the heart of long-term economic growth and economywide prosperity.

We conduct an empirical investigation, both qualitative and quantitative, on the role of patent examiner characteristics in the allocation of intellectual property rights. Building on insights gained from interviewing administrators and patent examiners at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), we collect and analyze a novel dataset of patent examiners and patent outcomes. This dataset is based on 182 patents for which the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruled on validity between 1997 and 2000. For each patent, we identify a USPTO primary examiner, and collect historical statistics derived from their entire patent examination history. These data are used to explore a number of hypotheses about the connection between the patent examination process and the strength of ensuing patent rights. Our main findings are as follows. (i) Patent examiners and the patent examination process are not homogeneous. There is substantial variation in observable characteristics of patent examiners, such as their tenure at the USPTO, the number of patents they have examined and the degree to which the patents that they examine are later cited by other patents. (ii) There is no evidence that examiner experience or workload at the time a patent is issued affects the probability that the CAFC finds a patent invalid. (iii) Examiners whose patents tend to be more frequently cited tend to have a higher probability of a CAFC invalidity ruling. The results suggest that all patent examiners are not equal, and that one of the roles of the CAFC is to review the exercise of discretion in the patent examination process.

Book Chapter - This Chapter explores the international structure of the biotech innovation process, discusses causes, quantitative measures to track international trends and impact on the firm, industry and US public policy

Published Study by the NYSE- This study makes the case for fundamental changes in the biomedical industry in the coming years. It predicts the ascendance of personalized medicine and sdescribes how the biomedical industry players will need to adapt to profound demographic, political and technological shifts in order to compete successfully in a world transformed by globalization forces.

This report for the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides a systematic evaluation and framework for occupation categories and industry structure in the biotechnology industry.

This report for the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides a systematic evaluation and framework for occupation categories and industry structure in the biotechnology industry.