Essays on the Economics of Science and Innovation

Abstract

This thesis consists of three chapters on the economics of science and innovation. The first chapter studies whether the rewards for publishing first in science induce scientists to rush and produce lower-quality work; the second estimates the magnitude of these priority rewards. The third chapter studies whether male and female patent examiners treat patent applications submitted by women differently.

The first chapter, joint with Ryan Hill, investigates how competition to publish first and thereby establish priority impacts the quality of scientific research. We begin by developing a model where scientists decide whether and how long to work on a given project. When deciding how long to let their projects mature, scientists trade off the marginal benefit of higher quality research against the marginal risk of being preempted. The most important (highest potential) projects are the most competitive because they induce the most entry. Therefore, the model predicts these projects are also the most rushed and lowest quality. We test the predictions of this model in the field of structural biology using data from the Protein Data Bank (PDB), a repository for structures of large macromolecules. An important feature of the PDB is that it assigns objective measures of scientific quality to each structure. As suggested by the model, we find that structures with higher ex-ante potential generate more competition, are completed faster, and are lower quality. Consistent with the model, and with a causal interpretation of our empirical results, these relationships are mitigated when we focus on structures deposited by scientists who – by nature of their employment position – are less focused on publication and priority.

The second chapter, also joint with Ryan Hill, studies priority rewards in science. The scientific community assigns credit or “priority” to individuals who publish an important discovery first. We examine the impact of losing a priority race (colloquially known as getting “scooped”) on subsequent publication and career outcomes. To do so, we take advantage of data from structural biology where the nature of the scientific process together with the Protein Data Bank — a repository of standardized research discoveries — enables us to identify priority races and their outcomes. We find that race winners receive more attention than losers, but that these contests are not winner-take- all. Scooped teams are 2.5 percent less likely to publish, are 18 percent less likely to appear in a top-10 journal, and receive 20 percent fewer citations. Getting scooped has only modest effects on academic careers. Finally, we document empirical evidence suggesting that the priority reward system reinforces inequality of attention in science.

The third chapter, joint with Jane Choi and Heidi Williams, considers the role of gender in the evaluation of patent applications submitted to the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). Using the quasi-random assignment of patents to patent examiners, we document two facts. First, male examiners are more lenient overall than female examiners. Second, we find that patent examiner gender appears to have no effect on the evaluation of patent applications submitted by female inventors relative to male inventors. In other words, male examiners are not differentially stringent (or lenient) compared to their female counterparts when evaluating patent applications submitted by women. Our analysis is not able to assess whether the patent application evaluation system as a whole holds female inventors to a higher standard than their male counterparts. However, these results stand in contrast with evidence from other markets which has suggested that female reviewers may hold female applicants to higher standard than male reviewers.