Subgrants recipients

• James Adams (University of Florida)
  Research, Teaching, and the Productivity of the Academic Labor Force
  The goals of this proposal are to measure the research and teaching productivity of the academic labor force, to trace these measures to factors that determine the supply and demand for university research and teaching services, and to investigate the tradeoffs between these two services in the short and long runs. In addition the studies proposed here will provide new estimates of supply functions for university research and teaching, and of demand functions for tenured and non-tenured faculty.
  
  
• Lee Branstetter (Columbia)
  The Globalization of R&D: Implications for S&E Labor Markets
  This project will use new data to address these issues. Through prior research, the principal investigator has built up a comprehensive data base of research/product development facilities established by Japanese multinationals in the U.S. To this data base will be added information on R&D subsidiaries established by European firms and by firms based in "advanced" developing countries, such as Taiwan and South Korea. These data will provide the basis for a quantitative assessment of the scale of foreign-supported private-sector research activity in the United States. This project will also make a first attempt to assess the scale of increased U.S. reliance on foreign-based S&E workers. First, I will measure the scale of R&D expenditures by the overseas affiliates of U.S.-based multinationals over the last two decades. Second, I will examine the fraction of U.S. multinational patents generated by inventors based outside the United States. Third, I will use the SDC Strategic Alliance database and the CATI database to track U.S. firms licensing of foreign technology and cross-border technology alliances. Again, these data sources should provide the basis for at least a preliminary assessment of the scale of "R&D outsourcing" by U.S.-based multinationals. In addition to the quantitative analysis of new data sets, the project will be guided by a set of interviews the principal investigator will conduct with foreign R&D managers based in the United States and U.S. R&D managers in charge of the operations of overseas R&D affiliates. This will provide useful qualitative information, and should aid in interpreting the results of empirical analysis.
  
  
• Geoff Davis (Sigma Xi)
  The Postdoc Policy Database Project
  We propose to create a database that pools information from postdoc offices and associations on the postdoc policies and resources in place at universities and research institutes (including non-monetary compensation policies) and on the nature and funding of these offices and associations. This survey questionnaire has been completed and the survey is almost ready to go to the field.
  
  
• Sharon Levin (University of Missouri)
  Advancement and Retention of Underrepresented IT Workers
  This research concerns minorities, women, and foreign-born scientists and engineers in IT fields. With these funds supplementing an existing NSF grant, the project studies whether women and under-represented minorities either trained in IT fields or employed in IT occupations have different rates of retention and advancement. The study also examines whether the rate at which individuals not trained in IT fields are absorbed into IT jobs differs by gender and minority status.
  
  
• Ronald Oaxaca (University of Arizona)
  Production of Engineering Degrees in American Colleges and Universities: An Informal Proposal
  This informal proposal describes a small research project on modeling the production of U.S. engineering degrees. This project is envisioned as a component of a larger research project that will examine the mobility of S&E workers across S&E sub-fields. The entire project will involve modeling with both individual level data and aggregate data. For present purposes we are relying upon aggregate time-series data to model the production of engineering degrees as a dynamic process. Our initial focus is on four sub-fields of engineering for which we have obtained reasonably consistent data. These are chemical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. The data obtained so far have come from NSF, NCES, and NACE. An important focus of our g effort is the separate roles of federal, private, and university R&D spending on engineering degree production. Normally, one views R&D spending as a demand-side variable. Our approach treats distributed lags of R&D spending as indicators of long-run opportunities in S&E fields apart from market information inherent in starting salaries in the various engineering sub-fields. Starting salaries are interpreted as indicators of spot labor market conditions for newly minted degrees.
  
  
• Paula Stephan (Georgia State)
  Firm Placement of New PhDs and Issues of Foreign-Born and Foreign Educated PhDs (2003)
  Funds will be used to support the two ongoing S&E projects. Three papers have resulted from this work this year: Firm Placements of New Ph.D.s: Implications for Knowledge Spillovers (Paula E. Stephan, Albert J. Sumell, Grant C. Black and James D. Adams), forthcoming in special volume to be published by the Max Planck Institute; Public Knowledge, Private Placements: New Ph.D.s as a Source of Knowledge Spillovers, (Stephan, Sumell, Black and Adams), forthcoming in Economic Development Quarterly; The Importance of Foreign Ph.D. Students to U.S. Science (Black and Stephan), presented at the recent CHERI conference. In addition, we will begin an exploratory study of the feasibility of updating the work that Levin and Stephan did in the mid-1990s concerning the contribution of the foreign-born and foreign-educated to U.S. science. The funds will also help support the capability for the Georgia State team to provide quick turn around in answering certain S&E labor force questions that arise from time to time and are of interest to the Workforce Project. The primary source of data that will be used in answering information requests is the SESTAT data of NSF. We maintain licenses for use of this data and are extremely familiar with this data.
  
  
• Paula Stephan (Georgia State)
  Firm Placement of New PhDs and Issues of Foreign-Born and Foreign Educated PhDs (2002)
  This research will focus on the firm placement of new Ph.D.s, as well as the work on issues related to the foreign-born and foreign-educated in science and engineering. The funds for the post-doc will also help support this work as well as provide the capability for the Georgia State team to provide quick turn around in answering certain S&E labor force questions that arise from time to time and are of interest to the Workforce Project. Examples of this include the work that the GSU group did in late 2001 concerning the visa status of recent Ph.D.s in the U.S. and information to support the discussions that we are having with NSF concerning the design of a survey of post docs in the U.S. The primary sources of data that will be used in answering information requests is the SESTAT data of NSF. We maintain licenses for use of this data and are extremely familiar with this data.