If innovation is to be subsidized, a natural place to start is to increase the quantity and quality of human capital. Innovation, after all, begins with people. Simply stimulating the "demand side" through R&D subsidies and tax breaks may only drive up the price, rather than the volume of...

Knowledge of how science is consumed in public domains is essential for a deeper understanding of the role of science in human society. While science is heavily supported by public funding, common depictions suggest that scientific research remains an isolated or 'ivory tower' activity, with...

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...

This is an invited chapter for the forthcoming Volume 4 of the Handbook of Industrial Organization. We summarize the state of the literature on the economics of innovation and highlight open policy questions. We first articulate the key market failures in markets for innovation, and then discuss...

Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat's power; and (ii) the autocrat's demand for the technology stimulates further innovation in applications beyond those...

We study the optimal allocation of R&D resources in an endogenous growth model with an innovation network, through which one sector's past innovations may benefit other sectors' future innovations. First, we provide closed-form sufficient statistics for the optimal path of R&D resource...

The Chinese government has been using various subsidies to encourage innovations by Chinese firms. This paper examines the allocation and impacts of innovation subsidies, using the data from the China Employer Employee Survey (CEES). We find that the innovation subsidies are preferentially...

A large number of countries around the world now provide some kind of tax incentive to encourage firms to undertake innovative activity. This paper presents the policy rationale for these incentives, discusses their design and potential effectiveness, and reviews the empirical evidence on their...

How do innovation and education policy affect individual career choice and aggregate productivity? This paper analyzes the various layers that connect R&D subsidies and higher education policy to productivity growth. We put the development of scarce talent and career choice at the center of a...