TLS: Assessing the Impact of Science Policy on the Rate and Direction of Scientific Progress: Frontier Tools & Applications

National Bureau Of Economic Research Inc, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

While the cumulative nature of knowledge is recognized as central to economic growth, the microeconomic and institutional foundations of cumulativeness are less understood. Although "Open Science" is widely recognized to play a central role in the production and diffusion of fundamental knowledge, few formal analyses support this understanding of the impact of policies and practices on the rate and direction of scientific progress. This study focuses on the development and implementation of novel tools for quantitative analysis of the impact of science policy interventions on the process of cumulative scientific discovery. This analysis extends prior research by exploiting the recent availability of detailed citation data with frontier methods from the program evaluation literature. The approach moves beyond traditional cross-sectional comparisons of citations associated with knowledge in different institutional or policy environments; instead, "natural experiments" are utilized, where the conditions governing access, diffusion or follow-on research funding associated with a given piece of knowledge are changing over time. This approach allows the role of institutions and policy to be disentangled in shaping scientific progress from the intrinsic variation in scientific importance across discoveries. Specifically, the study outlines three types of tools: a differences-in-differences approach to citation analysis, the explicit comparison of changes in citation behavior in different subpopulations, and the development of an approach to recover the "distribution" of the impact of policy interventions. These tools can be fruitfully applied to provide novel policy analysis for a range of science policy interventions, from choices about the level of (and restrictions on) public funding, rules governing access to scientific research materials and data, and policies regarding intellectual property rights for discoveries resulting from the scientific process. In particular, the tools allow for the evaluation of science policy intervention on the rate and direction of scientific progress, and allows for the evaluation of the distributional consequences of policy initiatives. There are three potential applications of the tools in some detail, including (a) the impact of intellectual property rights on the diffusion and use of academic science, (b) the impact of national science policies on the geography and distribution of stem cell research, and (c) the impact of institutions that facilitate the sharing of research resources on the dynamics of knowledge accumulation in life sciences research. In sum, the outputs of the research will include papers that focus on the development of the tools per se, and papers that apply the tools in the context of applications focused on important science policy challenges. This study will inform: (a) science policy analysis, by developing and implementing tools that can assess the impact of specific policies and institutions on the rate, direction, and composition of scientific activities; (b) the study of the economics of science, by elaborating the microeconomic and institutional foundations of knowledge accumulation, which supports economic growth; and (c) the sociology of science, by highlighting the roles of preexisting relationships, status, and networks in the expansion of the scientific community and explaining interactions between the features of the scientific system and its growth. More generally, the broader impact of this study is to provide a set of tools for a range of science policy questions that have so far resisted quantitative analysis, and to offer a novel domain for the application and adaptation of frontier methods for program evaluation. In particular, the results of this research will have a specific impact in the economics and sociology of science, as well as in science policy analysis per se. In addition, the study provides a bridge between the explosion of quantitative data about science as a potential new area for the application of tools in the program evaluation literature.