We describe the construction of a panel data set from the U.S. patent data that contains measures of inventors' life-cycle Ramp;D productivity--patents and patent citations. We match the data set to information on the U.S. pharmaceutical and semiconductor firms for whom they work. In this paper...

Recent theoretical and empirical studies have emphasized the fact that the prospect of international migration increases the expected returns to skills in poor countries, linking the possibility of migrating (brain drain) with incentives to higher education (brain gain). If emigration is...

We offer new evidence on indigenous innovation and intellectual returnees by estimating the relationship between patenting by Chinese photovoltaic firms and the presence of corporate leaders with international experience. Our research approach combines data from three sources: the industrial...

Rewarding inventors with inefficient monopoly power has long been regarded as the price of encouraging innovation. Public prescription drug insurance escapes that trade-off and achieves an elusive goal: lowering static deadweight loss, while simultaneously encouraging dynamic investments in...

The premature cancer mortality rate has been declining in Canada, but there has been considerable variation in the rate of decline across cancer sites. I analyze the effect that pharmaceutical innovation had on premature cancer mortality in Canada during the period 2000-2011, by investigating...

This paper provides evidence that risk aversion leads pharmaceutical firms to underinvest in radical innovation. We define a drug candidate as novel if it is molecularly distinct from prior candidates. Using our measure, we show that firms face a risk-reward tradeoff when investing in novel...

Recent work linking the adoption of key organizational practices to productivity raises an important question: if adoption increases productivity so dramatically, why does adoption across an industry take so long? This paper explores this question in the context of one particularly interesting...

This paper compares the clinical trial strategies and performance of large, established (quot;maturequot;) biopharmaceutical firms to those of smaller (quot;early stagequot;) firms that have not yet successfully developed a drug. We study a sample of 235 cancer drug candidates that entered...