We investigate the childhood determinants of adult height in populations, focusing on the respective roles of income and of disease. We develop a model of selection and scarring, in which the early life burden of nutrition and disease is not only responsible for mortality in childhood but also...

The Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) program is a major research training program administered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with funds appropriated each year by Congress. This study examines the impact of NRSA postdoctoral fellowships on subsequent...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plays a critical role in funding scientific endeavors in biomedicine that would be difficult to finance via private sources. One important mandate of the NIH is to fund innovative science that tries out new ideas, but many have questioned the NIH's ability...

Older scientists are often seen as less open to new ideas than younger scientists. We put this assertion to an empirical test. Using a measure of new ideas derived from the text of nearly all biomedical scientific articles published since 1946, we compare the tendency of younger and older...

Do intellectual property (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, this paper estimates the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent...

Despite its presumed role as an engine of economic growth, we know surprisingly little about the drivers of scientific creativity. In this paper, we exploit key differences across funding streams within the academic life sciences to estimate the impact of incentives on the rate and direction of...

While there is a well-established, large positive correlation between mental and physical health and education outcomes, establishing a causal link remains a substantial challenge. Building on findings from the biomedical literature, we exploit specific differences in the genetic code between...

This paper investigates the impact of federal extramural research funding on total expenditures for life sciences research and development (R&D) at U.S. universities, to determine whether federal R&D funding spurs funding from non-federal (private and state/local government) sources. We use a...

Caspi et al. (2002, 2003), Guo et al. (2008a), and Pescosolido et al. (2008) all claim to have demonstrated allele-by-environment interactions, but in all cases environmental influences are potentially endogenous to the unmeasured genetic characteristics of the subjects and their families. Thus,...

Considerable attention has been focused, in recent years, on the role that graduate and postdoc students play in the production of academic knowledge. Using data from the MIT Department of Biology for the period 1970-2000, we analyze the evolution over time of four fundamental aspects of their...