Evaluations of government Technology Development Funds (TDF) in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Panama are surveyed. All the evaluations were done at the recipient (firm) level using data from innovation surveys, industrial surveys, and administrative records of the granting units, together with...

Individuals involved in basic research, like other workers, respond to incentives. Funding agencies provide implicit incentives when they specify the rules by which awards are made. The following analysis is an exercise in understanding incentives at an applied level. Specific rules are examined...

About 20 percent of the gross investment expenditures of U.S. manufacturing firms is expenditures on research and development. Like investment in physical capital, R&D also responds to news about future prospects of the firm, such as profitability, technological opportunities, or changes in...

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...

This article examines the relationship between Research & Development (R&D) funding and the production of knowledge by academic chemists. Using articles published, either raw counts or adjusted for quality, we find a strong, positive causal effect of funding on knowledge production. This effect...

This study examines the contribution of Chinese diaspora researchers – those born in China but working outside the country – to China's catching up in global science to become a world leader in research publications and citations. Using a novel name-based way to identify Chinese diaspora...

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 distribution of Federal support for chemistry Research and Development (R&D) performed at U.S. universities from 1990-2009. Federal R&D funding is an essential source of funds for investigator-driven research at the nation's universities. Previous studies have documented that...

From its 1958 origin in defense, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) model for research funding has, in the last two decades, spread to other parts of the US federal government with the goal of developing radically new technologies. In this paper, we propose that the key elements of the...

This paper compares reward systems to intellectual property rights (patents and copyrights). Under a reward system, innovators are paid for innovations directly by government (possibly on the basis of sales), and innovations pass immediately into the public domain. Thus, reward systems engender...