TY  - JOUR
AU  - Adams,James D.
AU  - Clemmons,J. Roger
TI  - The Origins of Industrial Scientific Discoveries
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13823
PY  - 2008
Y2  - February 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13823
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13823.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
James D. Adams
Department of Economics
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
3406 Russell Sage Laboratory
Troy, NY  12180-3590
Tel: 518/276-2523
Fax: 518/276-2235
E-Mail: adamsj@rpi.edu

J. Roger Clemmons
Institute for Child Health Policy, College of Medi
The University of Florida
PO Box 100147
Gainesville, FL 32610-0147
E-Mail: jrc@ichp.ufl.edu
AB  - This paper estimates science production functions for R&D-performing firms in the United States using scientific papers as the measure of output, by analogy with patents.  The underlying evidence covers 200 top U.S. R&D firms during 1981-1999 as well as 110 top U.S. universities. We find that industrial science builds on past scientific research inside and outside the firm, with most of the returns to scale in production deriving from outside knowledge.  In turn, the largest outside contribution derives from universities rather than firms; this is especially true when papers are weighted by citations received, a measure of their importance.  Consistent with the role assigned to knowledge spillovers in growth theory, the importance of outside knowledge, especially that of universities, increases from the firm to the industry level. The findings survive the inclusion of fixed effects, interactions among the effects, variations in sample and specification, and efforts to control for endogeneity.
ER  -