America's most innovative firms participate in the U.S. Commerce Department's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) those that participated at least once accounted for over 40 percent of U.S. patents to U.S. entities during 1988-1996. Many firms are repeat participants. ATP participation has...

This paper investigates changes in the output and productivity of research and development activities in Japanese manufacturing firms over the 1980s and 1990s. Evidence from aggregate patent and R&D statistics and a micro-level analysis of R&D productivity at the firm-level suggest that there...

Motivated by differences in R&D productivity across advanced economies, this paper presents an empirical examination of the determinants of country-level production of international patents. We introduce a novel framework based on the concept of national innovative capacity. National innovative...

This paper compares reward systems to intellectual property rights (patents and copyrights). Under a reward system, innovators are paid for innovations directly by government (possibly on the basis of sales), and innovations pass immediately into the public domain. Thus, reward systems engender...

European countries do less research than Japan and the United States. We use a quantitative multi-country growth model to ask: (i) Why is this so? (ii) Would there be any benefit to expanding research in Europe? (iii) What would various European research promotion policies do? We find that (i)...

Individuals involved in basic research, like other workers, respond to incentives. Funding agencies provide implicit incentives when they specify the rules by which awards are made. The following analysis is an exercise in understanding incentives at an applied level. Specific rules are examined...

About 20 percent of the gross investment expenditures of U.S. manufacturing firms is expenditures on research and development. Like investment in physical capital, R&D also responds to news about future prospects of the firm, such as profitability, technological opportunities, or changes in...

This paper examines how employee earnings at small firms respond to a cash flow shock in the form of a government R&D grant. We use ranking data on applicant firms, which we link to IRS W2 earnings and other U.S. Census Bureau datasets. In a regression discontinuity design, we find that the...

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...