This paper examines argues that while two distinct perspectives characterize the foundations of the public funding of research - filling a selection gap and solving a disclosure problem - in fact both the selection choices of public funders and their criteria for disclosure and commercialization...

We develop a model of firm learning in volatile markets with noisy signals and test its predictions using historical data from the Ifo Institute's Business Climate Survey. We find that firms' forecasts improve as they age. We also exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment where firms...

A political miracle occurred when Germany was reunited, and at first glance an economic miracle has followed. Real incomes in the east have now reached the western level, and investment per capita has been much higher than in the west. However, every third deutschmark spent in the east has been...

We study a Chinese policy that awards substantial tax cuts to firms with R&D investment over a threshold or “notch.” Quasi-experimental variation and administrative tax data show a significant increase in reported R&D that is partly driven by firms relabeling expenses as R&D. Structural...

We simultaneously assess the contributions to productivity of three sources of research and development spillovers: geographic, technology and product-market proximity. To do this, we construct a new measure of geographic proximity that is based on the distribution of a firm's inventor locations...

Research Joint Ventures (RJVs) are projects that combine the research resources of different firms. A sample of RJVs supported by the U.S. Advanced Technology Program shows that the projects yield revenues that are far less than costs. Related to this point, the RJVs are subject to...

This paper examines R&D activities in the European Community using the Community R&D Information Service (CORDIS) databases. We find that a country's private companies tend to be specialized in the same scientific fields as its universities and public organizations. In addition, we construct...

We examine the quantitative impact of policy-induced changes in innovative investment by firms on growth in aggregate productivity and output in a model that nests several of the canonical models in the literature. We isolate two statistics, the impact elasticity of aggregate productivity growth...

The standard view of U.S. technological history is that the locus of invention shifted during the early twentieth century to large firms whose in-house research laboratories were superior sites for advancing the complex technologies of the second industrial revolution. In recent years this view...

Technological progress is typically a result of trial-and-error research by competing firms. While some research paths lead to the innovation sought, others result in dead ends. Because firms benefit from their competitors working in the wrong direction, they do not reveal their dead-end...