R & D
Innovation and Incentives: Evidence from Corporate R&D
By Josh Lerner and Julie M Wulf
Beginning in the late 1980s, American corporations began increasingly linking the compensation of central research personnel to the economic objectives of the corporation. This paper examines the impact of the shifting compensation of the heads of corporate research and development. Among firms with centralized R&D organizations, a clear relationship emerges: more long-term incentives (e.g. stock options and restricted stock) are associated with more heavily cited patents. These incentives also appear to be associated with more patent filings and patents of greater originality. Short-term incentives appear to be unrelated to measures of innovation
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Exploring the Relationship Between Scientist Human Capital and Firm Performance: The Case of Biomedical Academic Entrepreneurs in the SBIR Program
By Andrew A. Toole and Dirk Czarnitzki
Do academic scientists bring valuable human capital to the companies they found or join? If so, what are the particular skills that compose their human capital and how are these skills related to firm performance? This paper examines these questions using a particular group of academic entrepreneurs - biomedical research scientists who choose to commercialize their knowledge through the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research Program.
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EDUCATION
The Race between Education and Technology: The Evolution of U.S. Educational Wage Differentials, 1890 to 2005
By Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz
U.S. educational and occupational wage differentials were exceptionally high at the dawn of the twentieth century and then decreased in several stages over the next eight decades. But starting in the early 1980s the labor market premium to skill rose sharply and by 2005 the college wage premium was back at its 1915 level. The twentieth century contains two inequality tales: one declining and one rising.
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