Events

Luc Desaunettes will talk about Justification for a legal protection of trade secrets. Andrea Bauer will moderate.

Abstract:

Research which explores unchartered waters has a high potential for major impact but also carries a high uncertainty of having minimal impact. Such explorative research is often described as taking a novel approach.

This study examines the complex relationship between pursuing a novel approach and impact. We measure novelty by examining the extent to which a published paper makes first time ever combinations of referenced journals, taking into account the difficulty of making such combinations. We apply this newly developed measure of novelty to a set of one million research articles across all scientific disciplines. We find that highly novel papers, defined to be those that make more (distinct) new combinations, have more than a triple probability of being a top 1% highly cited paper when using a sufficiently long citation time window to assess impact.

Moreover, follow-on papers that cite highly novel research are themselves more likely to be highly cited. However, novel research is also risky as it has a higher variance in the citation performance. These findings are consistent with the “high risk/high gain” characteristic of novel research.

We also find that novel papers are typically published in journals with a lower than expected Impact Factor and are less cited when using a short time window. Our findings suggest that science policy, in particular funding decisions which are over reliant on traditional bibliometric indicators based on short-term direct citation counts and Journal Impact Factors, may be biased against novelty. (Authors: Jian Wang/Reinhilde Veugelers/Paula Stephan)

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Extended Abstract

Abstract:

Patent offices around the world face massive backlogs of applications, which threatens to slow down the pace of technological progress. However, economists lack analytical tools to address the issue. This paper provides a model of patent backlog inspired from the traffic congestion literature.

Inventors in the cohort are heterogeneous with respect to desired patent pendency duration and react in anticipation of the waiting time resulting from the backlog. They can accelerate or slow down pendency duration by adapting their filing strategy. We find that the backlog impedes patent examination progress by providing incentives to strategically manipulate pendency.

We discuss three policy responses: increasing examination capacity; introducing a penalty fee; and altering the value of pending applications.

This paper challenges the conventional belief that entrepreneurship is an unstable career path. Entrepreneurship is shown to decrease rather than increase individuals’ turnover tendencies. This finding persists after controlling for lock-in effects associated with sunk costs and unfavorable outside options.

Entrepreneurship is argued to represent a high quality job-match for individuals who otherwise portray above average turnover rates. Arguably, matching emerges from (i) preferences for independence, (ii) skills composition, and (iii) redeployability of human capital into new settings. The counter-intuitive finding – entrepreneurship yields greater employment stability – has fundamental implications for our understanding of entrepreneurship entry and labor market dynamics.

We study the effect of incentives on different dimensions of creative work. To do so, we introduce a novel real-effort task that allows us to measure quantity, usability, and novelty of individuals’ creative output. In three treatments, we introduce incentives either for quantity alone or for quantity in combination with usability or novelty. We compare performance in these treatments to a baseline with fixed incentives. We find that incentivizing quantity alone or quantity in combination with novelty results in an increase in quantity and novelty and a decrease in the average quality compared to the baseline. Combined incentives for quality and quantity do not have a significant effect on any of the dimensions of creativity. Our findings are in line with a multi-tasking model where agents choose an optimal allocation of effort between quantity and usability and novelty is negatively correlated to quality. (Authors: Katharina Laske/Marina Schröder)

This paper focuses on the validation of data obtained from Google Trends as a measure of brand strength. We focus on brands of car manufacturers and types and show that searches on Google Trends predict registrations of cars in long panels. We use data for Germany and for the United Kingdom. To deal with endogeneity we make use of the introduction of scrappage subsidies in 2008/2009 as a natural experiment. We identify and address challenges from non-stationarity and serial correlation in the data. (Authors: Georg von Graevenitz/Christian Helmers)

Using panel data for 36,652 research articles published by authors from 798 institutions in 5 countries (Bolivia, Ecuador, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru), we analyze the role of access to academic works in developing countries. A focus will be drawn to the impact of a recent initiative (OARE) that seeks to provide research institutions in developing countries with free or reduced fee access to scientific literature in the field of environmental science. We use bibliometric data from Web of Science and institutions’ OARE registration data provided by the World Health Organization. We find a positive treatment effect, revealing that OARE institutions publish more as compared to non-OARE institutions. Most interestingly, we find that registration to OARE has increased competition between researchers within and between countries in different regions in the developing world. In particular, our evidence reveals a crowding-out effect for researchers from non-member institutions. (Authors: Frank Mueller-Langer/Marc Scheufen/Patrick Waelbroeck)