We study the relationships between corporate R&D and three components of public science: knowledge, human capital, and invention. We identify the relationships through firm-specific exposure to changes in federal agency R\&D budgets that are driven by the political composition of congressional...

Investments in the US Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and Innovation (STEMI) enterprise come from many different sectors and their combined effect crucially enhances the nation's competitiveness. Philanthropy is an under-appreciated component of this ecosystem, providing $21.5 billion...

Motivated by the establishment of major U.S. Federal programs seeking to harness the potential of regional innovation ecosystems, we assess the promise and challenges of place-based innovation policy interventions. Relative to traditional research grants, place-based innovation policy...

Moving beyond the combination of adoption subsidies, standards, and (albeit limited) attempts at carbon pricing that largely characterized U.S. climate policy over the last decade, recent climate-related legislation has transformed not only the scale of U.S. climate activities but also the...

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...

The United States emerged from World War II as the acknowledged global leader in basic science and its industrial application. While U.S. science has been able to maintain that preeminence in most areas, the nation's technological lead has met increasingly formidable challenges from abroad....

The speed with which Covid-19 vaccines were developed and their high-performance underlines how much society depends on the pace of scientific research and how effective science can be. This is especially the case for vaccines based on the new designer mRNA technology. We draw on this...

Innovation policy can be a crucial component of governments' responses to crises. Because speed is a paramount objective, crisis innovation may also require different policy tools than innovation policy in non-crisis times, raising distinct questions and tradeoffs. In this paper, we survey the...

Copyrights for books, news, and other types of media are a critical mechanism to encourage creativity and innovation. Yet economic analyses continue to be rare, partly due to a lack of experimental variation in modern copyright laws. This paper exploits a change in copyright laws as a result of...

Why don't poor countries adopt more productive technologies? Is there a role for policies that coordinate technology adoption? To answer these questions, we develop a quantitative model that features complementarity in firms' technology adoption decisions: The gains from adoption are larger when...