Research Policy最新文献

In this study, we investigate how knowledge spillovers create entrepreneurial opportunities using the adoption of BITNET, an early predecessor of the Internet, across universities in the U.S. as an exogenous shock to the knowledge base in the county where the university is located. Using County Business Patterns data, we find a positive relationship between entrepreneurship, measured by the increase in the number of establishments in a county, and the adoption of BITNET at a university in that county. Further, this relationship is stronger for establishments in high-tech industries and for smaller establishments. We also find that the number of patents and citations in a county increase after the adoption of BITNET in a county. These results indicate that knowledge spillovers from local universities can have a strong impact on entrepreneurial opportunities in a location, consistent with the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship.

Despite the critical role of creativity in advancing science and technology, our understanding of the funding schemes that drive creativity remains remarkably limited. Concerns have arisen that grants supporting predetermined projects may unintentionally encourage incremental research, prompting governments to explore different funding approaches. For instance, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) initiated the Excellent Young Scientists Fund (EYS), a prestigious talent funding program designed to support junior scientists. Given that radical innovation is a key concern for contemporary China, we empirically estimate the impact of the EYS program on scientific productivity, citation impact, and the generation of radical research. Utilizing a unique dataset, we find that the EYS program enhances both the productivity and citation impact of early-career Chinese scientists. Strikingly, we observe that EYS investigators tend to consolidate current science, resulting in a reduction of disruption compared to their counterparts. We propose several theories to explain this reduced level of disruption, with a particular focus on research strategies. Our investigations suggest that exploitation strategies and a focus on publishing hot-topic papers contribute to this observed effect. These findings provide valuable insights into the impact of funding and hold important policy implications for supporting disruptive research endeavors.

Post-doctoral scholars play a critical role in the innovation workforce and contribute to most scientific publications by US institutions. More than half of US postdoctoral scholars are temporary residents; of these, most earned PhDs abroad. We describe the experiences of international postdocs and find that salaries and many other dimensions of postdoc experiences are different for temporary residents, particularly those trained abroad, while on some dimensions - career guidance, recognition for their work, and work hours - their experiences are similar to those of US citizens and permanent residents. Productivity does not explain the different experiences; temporary residents have higher research productivity. Better matches with supervisors somewhat attenuate these differences, as does speaking English as a first language. However, even controlling for the quality of the match, language and productivity, foreign-educated temporary residents in particular have different experiences along several dimensions: salary and some benefits, involvement in grants and teaching, supervisor mentoring and collaboration outside the lab). Experiences are associated with postdocs' overall assessments of their positions and with changing their intentions to leave or remain in the US.

We examine how latecomers should allocate resources between innovation and imitation to overtake industry leaders across different technological regimes, characterized by appropriability, cumulativeness, and cycle time of technologies (CTT). Using computational models, we find that a one-sided focus on either innovation or imitation impedes technological leadership changes. Also, findings suggest that at early stages with low-level technologies, latecomers should prioritize imitation by allocating more resources to it. However, as they advance, a greater allocation of R&D resources to innovation becomes crucial. Next, we investigate the role of various technological regime variables in the interplay between this innovation-imitation mix. First, our simulations indicate that under a regime of low appropriability and high cumulativeness, allocating more resources to imitation tends to be more effective than focusing on innovation. Second, our simulations reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between CTT and the probability of latecomers overtaking industry leaders. There exists a certain level of CTT that maximizes the overtaking possibility because a short CTT offers latecomers opportunities from rapid obsolescence of leaders’ technologies but constrains latecomers’ learning from existing technologies. With a short CTT, it is advantageous for latecomers, particularly those starting with a low technology level, to allocate more resources to imitation.

This study investigated the impact of corporate innovation behavior resulting from the establishment of a personal data protection system (PDPS), with an emphasis on self-regulation. The findings revealed that implementing the PDPS significantly enhanced firms' innovation quantity by mitigating financial constraints and reducing risks However, concerning innovation quality, establishing a PDPS may hinder innovation novelty because of the limited availability of scarce data resources and information. Further analysis indicated that the above relationships became more pronounced when companies faced a heightened demand for personal data protection from the market, such as businesses facing a favorable economic institutional environment, businesses engaged in overseas operations, those operating in private data-sensitive industries, and those confronting cyber-attack threats. Additionally, firms' adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies resulted in a more significant effect of the PDPS on innovation quantity promotion and mitigated the inhibition of innovation quality. This study contributes to the existing research on privacy regulations and the determinants of corporate innovation. Unlike policy-event studies on personal data protection laws, this study focuses on the economic consequences of companies voluntarily implementing a PDPS and comprehensively characterizes its impact on corporate innovation behavior from both qualitative and quantitative aspects. Practical implications are also offered to the government, suggesting how to formulate relevant policies to promote a balance between enforcing policies and encouraging companies to autonomously enhance the PDPS, which is beneficial for fostering innovation in terms of quality and quantity.

Journal lists for the assessment of academic performance are widely used worldwide and inform many important decisions, such as, academic workload, salary, hiring, promotion, and tenure. The use of such lists, however, has long been a very controversial area in academia. Surprisingly, to date, there has been little empirical research investigating directly how journal lists have influenced publishing patterns by academics. This paper examines how the Academic Journal Guide (AJG) produced by the Chartered association of Business Schools has influenced the publishing patterns of UK academics by observing the authorship of over 400,000 papers published between 1 January 2011 and 30 June 2021. In terms of the AJG ratings, UK researchers have improved the quality of their research outputs over the period. There is strong evidence, however, that researchers in subject areas primarily associated with business schools are targeting the ratings rather than other measures of research quality. In these areas, journals that have been promoted/demoted in the AJG list have a higher/lower proportion of papers by UK researchers than similar journals that have not changed status. In addition, journals that have been promoted unjustifiably by reference to other metrics attract particularly high proportions of papers by UK researchers whereas those that have been demoted justifiably attract particularly low proportions of papers by UK researchers. Overall, whilst researchers are responding to publishing incentives, one of their strategies for doing so seems to be to game the AJG list. I discuss the implications of my findings and ways in which the negative aspects could be reduced.

We argue that the degree of concentrated ownership of international knowledge connections of a city in the hands of a small number of MNEs reduces the potential for knowledge spillovers and has a negative influence on the attractiveness of a city for new R&D investments. Ownership concentration in international knowledge connections reduces the positive influence of two complementary characteristics of international knowledge connectivity: the international connectedness (“depth”) and the geographical diversity (“breadth”) of the cities' international knowledge networks. Our analysis of the location decisions for 3235 new cross-border R&D investments made by 1599 firms distributed across 71 global cities (2003–2016) provides support for these hypotheses.

We study the mental health of PhD students in Sweden using comprehensive administrative data on prescriptions, specialist care visits, hospitalizations, and causes of death. We find that about 7 % (5 %) of PhD students receive medication or diagnosis for depression (anxiety) in a given year. These prevalence rates are less than one-third of the earlier reported survey-based estimates, and even after adjusting for difference in methodology, 43 % (72 %) of the rates in the literature. Nevertheless, PhD students still fare worse than their peers not pursuing graduate studies. Our difference-in-differences research design attributes all of this health disadvantage to the time in the PhD program. This deterioration suggests doctoral studies causally affect mental health.

This paper examines the impact of liberalization on the direction of technological change in the electricity sector. To this end, I use data on electricity-related patents filed between 1990 and 2018 in combination with a set of patent-level quality indicators and an instrumental variable approach. The results show that electricity liberalization leads to less dirty innovations and more clean energy patents. The increase in clean energy patenting is driven by innovations in electricity storage, renewable energy and combustion technologies with mitigation potential. New entrants play a key role in the increase in clean energy patents, while incumbents are responsible for the decline in dirty innovations. The reform also affects the knowledge inputs used in the development of clean energy technologies and encourages the use of knowledge spillovers from other technological fields.