Public R&D Investments and Private-sector Patenting: Evidence from NIH Funding Rules

2018/06/13 by Pierre Azoulay, Joshua Graff Zivin, Danielle Li +1 · 1 voice · 4 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Innovation Policy and R&D #Intellectual Property and Patents #Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy

paper · doi:10.1093/restud/rdy034

openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex publication_date 2018/06/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/18

Abstract

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.

Citations

• Absorptive Capacity, Coauthoring Behavior, and the Organization of Research in Drug Discovery
• The Log of Gravity
• Links and Impacts: The Influence of Public Research on Industrial R&D
• Science, the Endless Frontier
• A Practitioner’s Guide to Cluster-Robust Inference
• Analysing knowledge transfer channels between universities and industry: To what degree do sectors also matter?
• A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction
• Endogenous Technological Change

Cited by

• Regional R&D spending, absorptive capacity and the regional innovation paradox
• From Public Labs to Private Firms: Magnitude And Channels of Local R&D Spillovers
• Public research funding and science-based innovation: An analysis of ERC research grants, publications and patents
• The decline of research productivity? Hindering factors, remedies and the role of open science

Discussions

• Public R&D Investments and Private-Sector Patenting: Evidence from NIH Funding Rules, by Azoulay, Graff Zivin, Li, and Sampat (2019) [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]

Related

• NIH funding for patents that contribute to market exclusivity of drugs approved 2010–2019 and the public interest protections of Bayh-Dole
• Linking Science and Industry: Influence of Scientific Research on Technological Innovation through Patent Citations
• Public research funding and science-based innovation: An analysis of ERC research grants, publications and patents
• Linking science and industry: influence of scientific research on technological innovation through patent citations
• Publish or Patent: Bibliometric evidence for empirical trade-offs in national funding strategies