Using U.S. patent records in nanotechnoloy, we study the impact of university research on industry innovations with the premise that knowledge is diffused from universities to industry via personnel with university research experience. Appearing on a patent assigned to a university is evidence...

We use U.S. patent records to examine the role of research personnel as a pathway for the diffusion of ideas from university to industry. Appearing on a patent assigned to a university is evidence that an ineventor has been exposed to university research, either directly as a university...

This paper develops a dynamic model of the decisions regarding the quantity and quality of children, predicated on two premises: (1) the quality of children is uncertain when parents make a human capital investment decision, and (2) the quality distributions of two children of a woman are less...

It has long been recognized that worker wages and productivity are higher in large firms. Moreover, economists have been interested in the efficiency of large firms in R&D enterprises. This paper uses inventor panel data to examine the relationship between inventor productivity and firm size in...

The worldwide problem with pay-as-you-go, defined-benefits social security systems isn't just financial. Through a dynamic, overlapping-generations model where forming a family and bearing and educating children are choice variables, we show that social security taxes and benefits generate...

We decompose the recent patent increase into components representing (1) an increase in resources made available to research and development, (2) an across-the-board rise in the patent yield of an R&D dollar, and (3) changes in the patent yield in individual industries. Two high tech fields,...