Author(s)
Danielle Li
Pierre Azoulay
Joshua Graff-Zivin
Bhaven Sampat
We measure the extent to which NIH investments in basic science affect the
research choices of private sector firms. Using newly available data on patentpublication
links and exploiting the structure of NIH grant review, we address two
key econometric challenges to identifying spillovers. First, we measure the pool of
knowledge relevant for a firm by directly linking a firm's patent output to the
publications those patents cite, to the grants that fund those publications, and
ultimately to a pool of related research supported by the same grant funding
committee. Second, we address concerns about the endogeneity of federal funding
for disease areas by instrumenting investments in particular disease area with
changes in funding arising from other disease areas that use similar methods. This
is possible because the review committee an application is evaluated in tells us
about the methods the application uses, while the patenting firm and funding
institute tell us about the disease area of application. This analysis allows us to
examine what kinds of firms are most likely to take advantage of publicly funded
research and to quantify the impact of these spillover projects on innovation.
Date Published:
2013
Citations:
Li, Danielle, Pierre Azoulay, Joshua Graff-Zivin, Bhaven Sampat. 2013. "Spillovers from Publicly Funded Biomedical Research onto Industry".