Climbing atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research
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Stern_Climbing atop.pdf
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853.15 KB
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Author(s)
Stern, Scott
Furman, Jeffrey L.
Date Issued
August 2011
Journal
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Furman, Jeffrey L, and Scott Stern. “Climbing Atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research.” American Economic Review 101.5 (2011): 1933–1963.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
While cumulative knowledge production is central to growth, little empirical research investigates how institutions shape whether existing knowledge can be exploited to create new knowledge. This paper assesses the impact of a specific institution, a biological resource center, whose objective is to certify and disseminate knowledge. We disentangle the marginal impact of this institution on cumulative research from the impact of selection, in which the most important discoveries are endogenously linked to research-enhancing institutions. Exploiting exogenous shifts of biomaterials across institutional settings and employing a difference-in-differences approach, we find that effective institutions amplify the cumulative impact of individual scientific discoveries.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.101.5.1933
