NBER Publications by Mikko Packalen

Intelligently allocating research effort and funds requires deciding whether to build on recent advances or on more established knowledge. When recent advances create superior opportunities for invention, their adoption as research inputs in the invention process promotes technological progress. The gains from pursuing such innovative research paths may, however, be very limited, due to the undeveloped nature of new knowledge, quick obsolescence of fast-improving knowledge, and the vast scope of the existing knowledge base. In this paper, we first develop a new approach to identifying research inputs in invention. Next, we estimate the value of pursuing innovative research paths that are created by the arrival of new research inputs. We identify research inputs based on a natural language ...

This paper examines whether the composition of medical research responds to changes in disease incidence and research opportunities. The paper also provides new evidence on induced pharmaceutical innovation. In both cases we use the change in the demographic structure of the market (measured by age structure and obesity prevalence) to test the induced innovation hypothesis. Technological opportunity is calculated from estimates of structural productivity parameters. The extent of inventive activity is measured from the MEDLINE database on 16 million biomedical publications. We match these data with data on disease incidence. We show that medical research responds to changes in disease incidence and research opportunities. We also find that pharmaceutical innovation responds to aging- and o...

It is well known that public or pooled insurance coverage can induce a form of ex-ante moral hazard: people make inefficiently low investments in self-protective activities. This paper points out another ex-ante moral hazard that arises through an induced innovation externality. This alternative mechanism, by contrast, causes people to devote an inefficiently high level of self-protection. As an empirical example of this externality, we analyze the innovation induced by the obesity epidemic. Obesity is associated with an increase in the incidence of many diseases. The induced innovation hypothesis is that an increase in the incidence of a disease will increase technological innovation specific to that disease. The empirical economics literature has produced substantial evidence in fav...