Pop-Up Journal: Estimating the Economic Return to R&D Investment

The rate of return to R&D investments is a key driver of research investments in both the public and private sectors. The late Zvi Griliches, who launched the NBER’s Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship program, developed a framework for measuring this return. Despite decades of follow-on research, however, there is substantial variation in the answers to the “Griliches question” in different studies, along with a growing recognition that the answers to his question may be context-specific. This project coordinates economic research on R&D and innovation with the goal of narrowing the range of uncertainty with regard to rates of return and identifying the most promising directions for future research on this question.

This project is structured around a Pop-Up Journal which provides a platform for organizing and disseminating the relevant research literature and for highlighting the findings of new studies. This Journal serves as an information clearinghouse. It will include calls for papers for the project's annual research conferences, links to meeting presentations, a literature review that provides a guide to past research on the return to R&D, information about data sets that may be of interest to researchers studying the returns to R&D, and other research enablers.