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, economic growth, and social progress. 

Over the past several years, I have been piloting various efforts attempting to encourage more research aimed at improving how we -- as a society -- do science, and aimed at developing better science policy. 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. 

In our view, there is a need to develop a much richer support system to enable individuals with different backgrounds and skillsets to contribute to this work over the long-term. Matt Clancy, Dan Correa, Jordan Dworkin, Paul Niehaus, Caleb Watney and I recently 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, this discussion I recorded with Ruveyda Gozen and John Van Reenen, 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. 

Opportunities for PhD students

Opportunities for research support

Surveys

Many of the basic institutions that fund and support science are very poorly understood. To the extent that “production functions” for science are studied, they are largely modeled as dollars coming in and research papers and new discoveries coming out. For example, the fact that most scientific research dollars fund principal investigators that run research labs, which themselves employ, manage, mentor, and train students and postdocs is essentially treated as a black box. Yet it seems obvious that any serious effort to improve the productivity of scientific research has to start with understanding these key institutions. Building on the World Management Survey – a large, international data-collection process that has enabled researchers to study the quality of organizational management practices – we are undertaking two surveys:

Teaching materials


Data

Posted here, and described in this README, are digitized versions of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s Orange Book patent and exclusivity tables for years 1985-2016 (no Orange Book was published in 1986). PDF versions of the Orange Books were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and data from these PDF files was either hand-entered or parsed in order to create the digital files. For more details, including steps to add more recent years to the Orange Book data, see "The NBER Orange Book Dataset: A User's Guide," with Maya Durvasula, C. Scott Hemphill, Lisa Ouellette, and Bhaven Sampat. We are very grateful to the National Institute on Aging at the US National Institutes of Health, through grant P01AG005842 to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), for their support of this data digitization effort.