Events

Does grant peer review punish risk taking?  While risk is an inherent aspect of innovation, those projects with high degrees of risk may be more likely to lead to breakthrough innovation yet may face challenges in winning the support necessary to be carried out.  To study this, we analyze 103,164 R01-equivalent grants from the National Institutes of Health, 1980-2015.  To measure risk taking, we use four distinct approaches — extreme tail outcomes, disruptiveness, pivoting from an investigator’s prior work, and pursuing intellectually distant ideas from other investigators — that each capture a different aspect of what it means to take risks.  After carefully controlling for investigator, grant, and institution characteristics, we measure the association between risk taking and grant renewal.  Across each of these measures, we find grants with high levels of risk taking are renewed at lower rates than those with lower levels of risk taking. The magnitudes of these effects are large: when comparing grants in the top and bottom deciles of risk taking, grants with greater risk taking have a 20.5%, 24.4%, 16.9%, and 12.4% decline in renewal rate for each measure of risk taking, respectively.  We conclude with a discussion of the implications for policy-makers and managers of innovation for fostering risky research.

Contact person: Michael Rose

Registration

For organizational reasons we kindly ask you to communicate your participation to Valentina Moscon by October 14, 2022.

About the Book

With John Willinsky’s new (open access) book from MIT Press as a starting point, this workshop considers how copyright may be a remediable problem in our pursuit of what we now agree is best for science, namely, open access. After all, copyright offers publishers no legal support for open access, while bringing the full weight of the law to bear on journal subscription payments. Willinsky asks whether this is impeding the move to open access in a timely manner at a fair price; does it call for more than copyright workarounds, such as sharing final drafts? Willinsky invites consideration of two legislative remedies. The first is strengthening copyright’s research exceptions and limitations; the second is introducing statutory licensing for research publications. He inquires after the international implications of such reforms, particularly amid current European copyright initiatives. He asks, ultimately, whether it is time for those interested in the progress of science to take up copyright reform.

About the Author

John Willinsky is Professor, Simon Fraser University, and Khosla Family Professor Emeritus, Stanford University. Having founded the Public Knowledge Project in 1998, he has seen its open source Open Journal Systems (OJS) grow into the world’s most widely used journal platform. His dozen books include The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press 2006) and The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke (Chicago 2017).

Allocating innovation resources to their most productive uses is a challenge for innovators because they have incomplete information about which projects will be most productive. I empirically study how a group of large scientific labs traded off the exploitation of existing opportunities versus the exploration of new ones, that is whether they pursued safe projects to maximize short-term productivity or undertook high-variance projects to acquire information and improve long-term productivity. To recover how these labs made the exploitation-exploration tradeoff, I estimate a dynamic model of decision-making, assuming the labs approximated the value of exploration with a simple index. The type of index is well-studied in theory and well-used in practice but has not been applied to estimation of empirical decision models. The index model captures the labs’ decision-making well. Estimates of its free parameters suggest that the labs explored extensively. Counterfactual simulations show that, had the labs not explored, their output quantity would have decreased by 51%, and their citations would have decreased by 57%.

Contact person: Michael Rose

The Florence Seminar on Standard-Essential Patents aims at stimulating an in-depth discussion of approximately 14-16  selected academic papers focusing on the licensing and litigation of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs), with particular emphasis on the societal impact of the research findings.

Call for Papers

Please submit extended abstracts or full papers by 31 May 2022.

Acceptance notifications will be sent by mid-June 2022.

Final paper versions of the selected submissions are due by 18 September 2022.

Further information: Website of EUI

Contact: Shraddha Kulhari

Different kinds of literature have suggested inconsistent answers to motivations behind a firm’s disclosure strategy. Unlike patents, publications do not afford property rights but rather increases the chances of expropriation. A key unanswered question in the literature is: under which condition firms use publications as an instrument to recruit scientists?  Drawing on the innovation literature, I argue that when a tight labor market affords scientists higher bargaining power, firms tend to disclose more internal research via publications. To test this hypothesis, I use a novel dataset of 200 million job posts and 1.1 million firm-level publications from AI firms which have been experiencing a tight labor market. By linking firm-level labor demand with firm-level publications, I demonstrate how scientists’ bargaining power increases firm-level research disclosure. Specifically, I document that labor demand increases the number of AI publications, but only in the same fields of increased demands. This relationship is particularly salient when firms need highly skilled scientists (e.g., PhD holders, more skilled individuals). For identification strategy, I exploit the variation in AI exposure at the firm level, which influences firm-level demand for AI talents but not AI publications. Finally, using a novel methodology, I document that the shortage of scientists did not increase the number of patent-paper pairs or simultaneous disclosure of the same research projects in both patents and papers.

Contact: Michael E. Rose

Seminar jointly organized with TUM, TUM Main Campus, seminar room 0505.2544 (entrance from Luisenstraße/Theresienstraße, 2nd floor)

Knowledge spillovers drive a wedge between private and social returns to R&D. Efficient innovation policy assigns subsidies to fields where spillovers are relatively important. We develop new measures for the private and spillover value of patented innovations and embed these in a structural microeconomic model to estimate field-specific marginal returns to R&D support. We find that expected returns to subsidy vary strongly by field and country, suggesting that targeted innovation policy has large potential to increase welfare. Because spillovers cross country borders unevenly, supranational coordination of innovation policy offers large potential efficiency gains, especially for smaller countries.

Contact: Fabian Gaessler

Intellectual Property as Loan Collateral

Presenter: David Heller (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition)

Discussant: Annabelle Haché Harter (TUM)

Technology Governance as Selection Criterion: The Case of Smart Cities

Presenter: Lucia Baur (TUM)

Discussant: Safia Bouacha (ISTO)

Using novel and large-scale data, we reassess two claims on the effect of a connection to the editorial board of an economics journal and propose a new mechanism. Rather than editors helping departmental colleagues, the connection is particularly beneficial for the joining board members themselves; the impact on departmental colleagues who are not coauthors of the editor is comparatively small. Rather than a marked increase in quality thanks to connections, we find no such increase, if any, there is evidence of favouritism among journals with little editorial board rotation.

Contact: Michael E. Rose