TY  - JOUR
AU  - Azoulay, Pierre
AU  - Zivin, Joshua S. Graff
AU  - Li, Danielle
AU  - Sampat, Bhaven N
TI  - Public R&D Investments and Private-sector Patenting: Evidence from NIH Funding Rules
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 20889
PY  - 2015
Y2  - January 2015
DO  - 10.3386/w20889
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20889
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20889.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Pierre Azoulay
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-487
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/258-9766
Fax: 617/253-2660
E-Mail: pazoulay@mit.edu

Joshua S. Graff Zivin
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0519
La Jolla, CA 92093-0519
Tel: 858/822-6438
E-Mail: jgraffzivin@ucsd.edu

Danielle Li
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main St, E62-484
Cambridge, MA 02142
E-Mail: danielle.li@mit.edu

Bhaven N. Sampat
Department of Health Policy and Management
Columbia University
722 W 168th Street, Room 486
New York, NY 10032
Tel: 212/305-7293
E-Mail: bns3@columbia.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2015-05-07
AB  - 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.
ER  -