"Public R&D Investments and Private Sector Patenting: Evidence from NIH Funding Rules"

This paper measures the impact of public R&D investments on innovation by private, sector firms. We quantify the returns to grant spending at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in terms of the biomedical patents it generates. Our paper makes two contributions. First, we use newly constructed bibliometric data to develop a method for flexibly measuring the outcomes of basic science investments. Second, we take advantage of the institutional features of NIH peer review to address concerns about the endogeneity of grant funding. This work is preliminary: please contact me for the latest draft.