New scientific discoveries are the basis of long-term economic growth and social progress. In contrast with many historical accounts -- which often depict new ideas as arising serendipitously -- the lens of economics views innovation as an economic problem which depends on the active choices of individuals and firms who respond to incentives. The simple insight that incentives may affect which scientific discoveries are made as well as which discoveries successfully develop and diffuse into technologies with real-world impact opens the possibility that the design of public policies can have important effects on innovation, productivity, and economic growth.
Over the past several years, I have been piloting various efforts attempting to encourage more research in this area. Much of this work has been undertaken in close collaboration with Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney at the Institute for Progress, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington DC, as well as with Matt Clancy and Paul Niehaus.
Matt Clancy, Dan Correa, Jordan Dworkin, Paul Niehaus, Caleb Watney and I published a short comment in Nature -- To Speed Scientific Progress, Understand How Science Policy Works -- that describes some of our work. Below are more detailed descriptions of some of our early efforts to develop such an infrastructure. You can also get an overview by listening to this discussion Caleb Watney and I recorded with Cardiff Garcia, or by reading this Works in Progress piece Paul Niehaus and I wrote.
Partnership development
In my view, the highest-impact research projects in this area will grow out of a deep, organic understanding of -- or collaboration with -- the institutions whose work the research seeks to inform.
Some researchers will gain this translational knowledge by directly spending time in government service positions: working temporarily as a program officer at the National Science Foundation (NSF), or as a program manager at DARPA, or on a paid or unpaid assignment via the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) doing targeted work with a federal agency. The Sabbaticals in Service program aims to help with matchmaking these types of placements, with a focus on the economic and social sciences; for example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Visiting Scholars program is an example of the type of placement that we would like to support.
This translational knowledge can also sometimes be gained through more part-time or shorter-term engagements. One example of such a shorter-term engagement is the NSF Place-Based Innovation Policy Study Group, led by Jorge Guzman, Scott Stern, and I. The goal of the study group was to deploy “timely insight for the NSF Regional Innovation Engines program,” but also greatly benefitted the participating academics in surfacing academic research questions of interest to the NSF. For more details, see "Accelerating Innovation Ecosystems: The Promise and Challenges of Regional Innovation Engines" with Jorge Guzman, Fiona Murray, and Scott Stern.
The Federation of American Scientists (in particular, Dan Correa and Jordan Dworkin) and the Institute for Progress co-host the Metascience Working Group, which aims to build connective tissue between participating science funders (government agencies as well as private philanthropies) and researchers. We are very grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for their support of the Metascience Working Group.
Opportunities for PhD students
Visiting PhD students at Dartmouth. Inspired by Dartmouth’s International Economics PhD Fellowship, I have the opportunity to host PhD students with interests in the economics of innovation, productivity, and economic growth at Dartmouth for academic quarter-length visits. These fellows receive a stipend, an office in the Economics department, and the opportunity to present their own research to faculty for feedback. There are no teaching or research assistant obligations associated with the position: fellows are simply expected to be active members of the Dartmouth community. To apply, please e-mail heidi.lie.williams@dartmouth.edu with a single PDF appending (1) a cover letter indicating the preferred academic term(s) of residence; (2) a CV; (3) a one-page (max) summary of your research interests. Preference will be given to students who can be in residence for a full academic quarter. There is no deadline.
PhD fellowships: Graduate fellowships on fiscal and economic effects of innovation and productivity policies. In an effort to expand research on the fiscal and economic effects of innovation and productivity policies, as well as the number of researchers working on this topic, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) plans to offer up to six dissertation fellowships for the 2025-2026 academic year. As many as six additional early-career researchers -- researchers who received their PhDs in 2014 or later -- may be selected for unfunded fellowships. All of the fellows will be invited to participate in a research conference at the end of the academic year. Details of the program are available here. The deadline to apply is midnight (ET) on Thursday, January 16, 2025. The review committee will consist of Katharine Abraham, Tim Bresnahan, Michael Clemens, Susan Helper, Glenn Hubbard, Zach Liscow, Kim Rueben, Madeline Zavodny, and me. We are very grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for their support of this fellowship program.
PhD fellowships: Economic policy research with the Congressional support agencies. This program will support dissertation fellowships for PhD students in economics and economics-adjacent fields (such as health policy and public policy) who are interested in spending a year of their PhD doing economic policy research in collaboration with one of three non-partisan Congressional support agencies: the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Congressional Research Service (CRS), and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). Details of the program are available here. The deadline to apply is midnight (ET) on Thursday, January 30, 2025. The review committee will consist of Doug Elmendorf, Ted Gayer, Zach Liscow, Donald Marron, and me. We are very grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Analysis Group, and an anonymous donor for their support of this fellowship program.
Opportunities for research support
J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative (SfPI). J-PAL was instrumental in pushing forward society's understanding of what effective international development policy looks like, and how a field can learn to build up an effective evidence base for social change. We hope it can do the same for science. SfPI welcomes off-cycle proposals from J-PAL affiliates, J-PAL invited researchers (from any region or initiative), J-PAL postdoctoral fellows, J-PAL staff with a PhD, and PhD students with a J-PAL affiliate or invited researcher as an adviser. See the SfPI website for details; for applications requesting less than $75,000, Paul Niehaus and I (as SfPI co-chairs) aim to respond within two weeks of submission. In addition to financial support, applicants are welcome to request technical assistance from J-PAL North America's Research Management Support (RMS). Questions can be sent to sfpi@povertyactionlab.org, which will reach McKenzie Leier. We are very grateful to the Agency Fund, Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for their support of SfPI.
Teaching materials
Summer “camp” for PhD students on the economics of innovation. For several years, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has hosted a one-week summer “camp” for PhD students on the economics of innovation. The camp is currently co-organized by Kevin Bryan, Ina Ganguli, Ben Jones, Kyle Myers, and I. We are very grateful to Open Philanthropy for their support of this program.
Slides for the summer 2022, summer 2023 and summer 2024 lectures are available online.
Because the camp was over-subscribed (e.g. in summer 2022, we received over 150 applications for 25 funded slots in the program), we explicitly introduced an aspect of randomization in the final selection stage of our review process among applicants who were judged to be similarly promising; this randomization will hopefully afford us with an opportunity to try to better understand the impact of participating in the program [AEA RCT Registry ID AEARCTR-0009292].
Online short course for PhD students on the economics of ideas, science, and innovation. Several times over the past few years, I have co-taught in a (free) online short course for PhD students on the economics of ideas, science, and innovation. Slides for all of the lectures are available here. We are very grateful to the Institute for Progress for hosting this course.
Open-access course materials teaching the economics of innovation. Together with Kevin Bryan, I co-wrote a chapter for the 2021 Handbook of Industrial Organization on innovation policy. As a companion effort to that chapter, Kevin and I created an open-access set of lecture slides aimed at reducing the cost of others teaching this material. We designed these lecture slides to be modular, so that individual lectures could be used in a stand-alone fashion as part of a field course (e.g. a lecture on immigration and innovation that could be used as part of a labor economics course), but the lecture slides also fit together into a coherent framework for any faculty like myself who may want to use them for a full course on the economics of innovation. Kevin and I taught an early version of this material in a 2021 Continuing Education course at the American Economic Association (AEA) meetings, and I taught this material in a Stanford PhD course (Economics 244: Market Failures and Public Policy).
Let me also recommend Matt Clancy's New Things Under the Sun.