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 is a first step toward closing the analytical gap in the extensive literature on the results of interactions between public and private R&D expenditures, and their joint effects on the economy. Econometric studies in this area report a plethora of sometimes confusing and frequently...

Is public R&D spending complementary and thus "additional" to private R&D spending, or does it substitute for and tend to "crowd out" private R&D? Conflicting answers are given to this question. We survey the body of available economectric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years. A framework...

Despite their magnitude and potential economic impact, federal R&D expenditures outside of research universities have been little scrutinized by economists. This paper examines whether the series of initiatives since 1980 that have sought to encourage the patenting and technology transfer at the...

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...

Recent policy attention has focused on proposals to reduce prices for drugs that have received public funding. From an implementation perspective, such policies rely on public disclosure of government support for research. In this paper, we highlight two conceptual problems with past attempts to...

For decades, the US public and private sectors have committed substantial resources towards cancer research, but the societal payoff has not been well-understood. We quantify the value of recent gains in cancer survival, and analyze the distribution of value among various stakeholders. Between...

Recent studies consider public R&D spending that affects abatement knowledge and endogenous growth, distortionary taxes that affect physical and human capital formation, pollution taxes that affect environmental degradation, and regeneration that restores natural capital. Our model combines all...

When people can self-insure via migration, they may have less need for informal risk sharing. At the same time, informal insurance may reduce the need to migrate. To understand the joint determination of migration and risk sharing I study a dynamic model of risk sharing with limited commitment...

The mix of public and private research funding investments in alternative energy presents a challenge for isolating the effect of government R&D funding. Factors such as energy prices and environmental policy influence both private and public R&D decisions. Moreover, because government R&D is...