Over the past 60 years the United States has created the world's largest system of government laboratories. The impact of the laboratories on the private economy has been little studied though their research accounts for 14% of total U.S. R&D, more than the R&D of all colleges and universities...

This paper estimates science production functions for R&D-performing firms in the United States using scientific papers as the measure of output, by analogy with patents. The underlying evidence covers 200 top U.S. R&D firms during 1981-1999 as well as 110 top U.S. universities. We find that...

This paper takes a first look at the effect of Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRCs) on industrial R&D laboratories. IUCRCs are small academic centers designed to foster technology transfer between universities and firms. Since IUCRCs depend on industry support we expect them...

This paper studies localization of academic and industrial knowledge spillovers. Using data on U.S. Research and Development laboratories, that quantify spatial aspects of learning about universities and firms as well as their locations, I find that academic spillovers are more localized than...

Health care expenditures have been increasing sharply in the last ten years, with spending on mental health disorders being particularly prominent. Over the same time period, a number of new antipsychotic medications have been added to the armamentarium for treatment of persons diagnosed with...

We review in considerable detail the conceptual and measurement issues that underlie construction of medical care price indexes in the U.S., particularly the medical care consumer price indexes (MCPIs) and medical-related producer price indexes (MPPIs). We outline salient features of the medical...

Although broad trends in medical spending in the U.S. over the last decade have received widespread attention from policymakers, very little attention has focused on the components of those changes. For many other industries, economists typically divide nominal expenditures by an official...

This paper examines available U.S. data on academic R&D expenditures and the number of papers published and the number of citations to these papers as possible measures of `output' of this enterprise. We look at these numbers for science and engineering as a whole, for 5 selected major fields,...

To overcome the problem of insufficient research and development (R&D) on vaccines for diseases concentrated in low-income countries, sponsors could commit to purchase viable vaccines if and when they are developed. One or more sponsors would commit to a minimum price that would be paid per...