Azoulay Pierre, Li Danielle, Zivin Joshua S Graff, Sampat Bhaven N
MIT & NBER.
Harvard University.
Rev Econ Stud. 2019 Jan;86(1):117-152. doi: 10.1093/restud/rdy034. Epub 2018 Jun 15.
We quantify the impact of scientific grant funding at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on patenting by pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. Our paper makes two contributions. First, we use newly constructed bibliometric data to develop a method for flexibly linking specific grant expenditures to private-sector innovations. Second, we take advantage of idiosyncratic rigidities in the rules governing NIH peer review to generate exogenous variation in funding across research areas. Our results show that NIH funding spurs the development of private-sector patents: a $10 million boost in NIH funding leads to a net increase of 2.3 patents. Though valuing patents is difficult, we report a range of estimates for the private value of these patents using different approaches.
我们量化了美国国立卫生研究院(NIH)的科研资助对制药和生物技术公司专利申请的影响。我们的论文有两大贡献。第一,我们利用新构建的文献计量数据开发了一种方法,用于灵活地将特定的资助支出与私营部门的创新联系起来。第二,我们利用NIH同行评审规则中的特殊刚性,在各研究领域的资助中产生外生变化。我们的结果表明,NIH的资助推动了私营部门专利的发展:NIH资助增加1000万美元会使专利净增加2.3项。尽管评估专利价值很困难,但我们使用不同方法报告了这些专利私人价值的一系列估计值。