This CAREER research produces urgently needed empirical evidence on the effects of intellectual property rights and science policies on innovation. To investigate the effects of contemporary policy changes, which cannot be measured with contemporary data, it exploits substantial historical policy shifts that were exogenous to U.S. innovation. The research also constructs new data sets - including both patents and alternative measures of innovation - to improve our understanding of intellectual property rights and science policy on innovation in historical settings and today.
Intellectual Merit: Individual projects investigate the effects of immigrant scientists, compulsory licensing, patent pools, and the creation of patent rights for food crops on U.S. innovation. For example, the research uses the inflow of highly trained Jewish scientists, who fled the Nazi regime in Germany, as an exogenous event to help understand the potential benefits of receiving immigrant scientists. While existing studies of immigration have emphasized direct effects on wages and employment opportunities for native workers, this research investigates the potential long-run effects of receiving immigrant scientists on innovation by domestic scientists and engineers. Understanding these changes is essential because increases in innovation encourage economic growth and create new opportunities for employment. Complementary projects investigate effects of intellectual property rights policies, such as compulsory licensing, on innovation and examine improvements in food crops after the creation of intellectual property rights for plants in 1930 and in 1986 to test whether contemporary policies that strengthen intellectual property rights for biological innovations may help to secure world food supplies.
Broader Impact: Results from this CAREER research help guide government policies on immigration, patent laws, and innovation. Organizations like the USPTO and the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) have already requested presentations of new results on patent pools and plants patents. The CAREER-funded training of graduate students helps increase long-run research output on the impact of patents and innovative research-centered undergraduate courses encourage the dissemination of research output. Targeted mentoring and research collaborations increase the participation of minority students and women in academic research, and help to strengthen the representation of these groups among economists and scholars of innovation.
