Events

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room E10

Moderation: Jörg Hoffmann

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Estimates of the private and social rates of return to investments in R&D are of high interest to economists, managers and policymakers. An important problem in the literature is that the canonical model used to obtain such estimates only allows R&D to diffuse through spillovers. This is a serious limitation in a world increasingly characterized by active intellectual property (IP) enforcement and monetization. We create a new dataset of interactions in the market for technology between publicly held firms in the U.S. which allows us to generalize the canonical model with both spillovers and market-mediated technology transfers. We obtain four main findings using changes in tax incentives for R&D to identify causal effects. First, R&D accessed through technology markets is an important input in the generation of revenue. Second, conventional spillover estimates are contaminated with technology transfers because the weights traditionally used to capture spillovers are strongly correlated with matching in the market for technology. Third, the private rate of return to R&D is larger in the generalized framework while the wedge between the social and private returns is smaller. Finally, back of the envelope estimates suggest that the gains from trade in the market for technology might be larger than $1 trillion per year, accounting for 10% of total revenue in Compustat.

Contact Person: Dr. Rainer Widmann

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

An increasing number of research projects successfully involves the general public (the crowd) in tasks such as collecting observational data or classifying images to answer scientists’ research questions. Although such crowd science projects have generated great hopes among scientists and policy makers, it is not clear whether the crowd can also meaningfully contribute to other stages of the research process, in particular the identification of research questions that should be studied. We first develop a conceptual framework that ties different aspects of “good” research questions to different types of knowledge. We then discuss potential strengths and weaknesses of the crowd compared to professional scientists in developing research questions, while also considering important heterogeneity among crowd members. Data from a series of online and field experiments has been gathered and is currently analyzed to test individual- and crowd-level hypotheses focusing on the underlying mechanisms that influence a crowd’s performance in generating research questions. Our results aim for advancing the literatures on crowd and citizen science as well as the broader literature on crowdsourcing and the organization of open and distributed knowledge production. Our findings have important implications for scientists and policy makers.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

We investigate the determinants of industry researchers’ interactions with universities in different localities, distinguishing between local and international universities. We analyze the extent to which local and international interactions are enabled by different types of individual personal networks (education, career based), and by their access to different business networks through their employer companies (local vs. domestic or international multinational company networks). We control for selection bias and numerous other individual and firm-level factors identified in the literature as important determinants of interaction with universities. Our findings suggest that industry researchers’ personal networks play a greater role in promoting interactions with local universities (i.e. in the same region, and other regions in the same country) while researcher employment in a multinational is especially important for establishing interaction with universities abroad.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

This paper studies the changes in the influence of leading journals in economics, sociology and physics from 1975 to 2017. In economics, the influence of the so-called top 5 journals relative to second tier and top field journals increased starkly in the 1980s and 1990s, stabilizing afterwards. Moreover, the influence of top field journals showed a remarkable convergence in the same period. In contrast, in sociology the relative influence of top journals decreased in the 1980s. We then try to explain these different trends in a model of journal platform competition.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Does an increase in female medical researchers lead to more medical advances for women? In this paper, we investigate whether inventors’ gender is related to the content of their inventions. Using data on the universe of US biomedical patents, we find that patents with women inventors are significantly more likely to focus on female diseases and conditions. Consistent with the idea of women researchers choosing to innovate for women, we find stronger effects when the lead inventor on the patent is a woman. Women-led research teams are 26 percent more likely to focus on female health outcomes. Our findings suggest that the demography of inventors matters not just for who invents but also for what is invented.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room E10

Moderation: Professor Dr. Hanns Ullrich 

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

How important is information disclosure through patents for subsequent innovation? To answer this question, we examine the expansion of the USPTO Patent Library system after 1975. Before the Internet, patent libraries gave inventors access to patent documents. We find that after patent library opening, local patenting increases by 17% relative to control regions. Additional analyses suggest that the disclosure of technical information is the mechanism underlying this effect: inventors start to cite more distant prior art and the effect ceases after the introduction of the Internet. Our analyses thus provide evidence that disclosure plays an important role in cumulative innovation.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Marstallplatz 1, Munich, Room 101

Moderation: Laura Valtere