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American Economic Review: Vol. 101 No. 5 (August 2011)

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Climbing atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research

Article Citation

Furman, Jeffrey L., and Scott Stern. 2011. "Climbing atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research." American Economic Review, 101(5): 1933-63.

DOI: 10.1257/aer.101.5.1933

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. (JEL D02, D83, I23, O30)

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Authors

Furman, Jeffrey L. (Boston U)
Stern, Scott (MIT)

JEL Classifications

D02: Institutions: Design, Formation, and Operations
D83: Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief
I23: Higher Education and Research Institutions
O30: Technological Change; Research and Development: General


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