In December 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration released a proposed framework for exercising government "march-in" rights on high-priced taxpayer-funded drugs. While both proponents and critics of the new rules view them as having broad scope, march-in rights can be exercised only on patents...

A number of market failures have been associated with R&D investments and significant amounts of public money have been spent on programs to stimulate innovative activities. In this paper, we review some recent microeconomic studies evaluating effects of government sponsored commercial R&D. We...

Sparked by concerns about their shrinking market share, 14 leading U.S. semiconductor producers, with the financial assistance of the U.S. government in the form of $100 million in annual subsidies, formed a joint R&D consortium -- Sematech -- in 1987. Using Compustat data on all U.S....

The speed with which Covid-19 vaccines were developed and their high-performance underlines how much society depends on the pace of scientific research and how effective science can be. This is especially the case for vaccines based on the new designer mRNA technology. We draw on this...

Innovation policy can be a crucial component of governments' responses to crises. Because speed is a paramount objective, crisis innovation may also require different policy tools than innovation policy in non-crisis times, raising distinct questions and tradeoffs. In this paper, we survey the...

This paper examines the U.S. government's intramural research and development efforts over a 40-year period, drawing together multiple human capital, government spending, and patent datasets. The U.S. Federal Government innovates along four dimensions: technological, organizational, regulatory,...

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers, researchers, and journalists have made comparisons to World War II. In 1940, a group of top U.S. science administrators organized a major coordinated research effort to support the Allied war effort, including significant investments in...

"In advanced economies like the United States, innovation has long been recognized as a central force for increasing socioeconomic prosperity and improving human health. Today, U.S. government policy seeks to promote innovation through a suite of mechanisms, from tax credits in the private...

The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to have caused over 7 million deaths and reduced economic output by over $13 trillion to date. While vaccines were developed and deployed with unprecedented speed, pre-pandemic investments could have accelerated their widespread introduction, saving millions of...

This chapter reviews the data and literature on gender, race and ethnicity differences in research funding in the United States and Europe. The gender gap in research funding has closed at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in the United States and substantially...