Search Results
Working Paper
The Social Returns to Public R&D
Recent empirical evidence by Fieldhouse and Mertens (2024) points to a strong causal link between federal nondefense R&D funding and private-sector productivity growth, and large implied social returns to public R&D investment. We show that these high social return estimates broadly align with existing evidence on the social returns to private or total R&D spending. If the R&D increases authorized under the CHIPS and Science Act were fully appropriated, our modeling indicates a boost in U.S. productivity within a few years, reaching gains of 0.2–0.4% after seven years or more. At their ...
Working Paper
The Returns to Government R&D: Evidence from U.S. Appropriations Shocks
We estimate the causal impact of government-funded R&D on business-sector productivity growth. Identification is based on a novel narrative classification of all significant postwar changes in appropriations for R&D funded by five major federal agencies. Using long-horizon local projections and the narrative measures, we find that an increase in appropriations for nondefense R&D leads to increases in various measures of innovative activity, and higher productivity in the long run. We structurally estimate the production function elasticity of nondefense government R&D capital using the SP-IV ...
Working Paper
Do Non-Compete Covenants Influence State Startup Activity? Evidence from the Michigan Experiment
This paper examines how the enforceability of employee non-compete agreements affects the entry of new establishments and jobs created by these new firms. We use a panel of startup activity for the U.S. states for the period 1977 to 2013. We exploit Michigan?s inadvertent policy reversal in 1985 that transformed the state from a non-enforcing to an enforcing state as a quasi-natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of enforcement on startup activity. Our findings offer little support for the widely held view that enforcement of non-compete agreements negatively affects the entry rate ...
Journal Article
Digital Currency, Digital Payments, and the 'Last Mile' to the Unbanked
Digital forms of payment are either not accessible or highly costly for unbanked consumers. This is because these forms of payment must be "funded" by some source of money, such as cash or a bank account. That creates the "last-mile" problem for the unbanked. This article examines various solutions for the funding problem that have been proposed in the literature, by regulators, and in bills submitted to Congress.
Working Paper
Forecasting the Economic Effects of AI
We elicit forecasts of how AI will affect the U.S. economy, comparing the beliefs of five groups: academic economists, employees at AI companies, policy researchers focused on AI, highly accurate forecasters, and the general public. The median respondent in each group expects substantial advances in AI capabilities by 2030, small declines in labor force participation consistent with demographic shifts, and an annual GDP growth rate of 2.5%, which exceeds both the typical medium-run (2.0%) and long-run (1.7%) baseline forecasts from government agencies and private-sector forecasters. ...
Working Paper
DO NON-COMPETE COVENANTS INFLUENCE STATE STARTUP ACTIVITY? EVIDENCE FROM THE MICHIGAN EXPERIMENT
This paper examines how the enforceability of employee non compete agreements affects the entry of new establishments and jobs created by these new firms. We use a panel of startup activity for the U.S. states for the period 1977 to 2013. We exploit Michigan’s inadvertent policy reversal in 1985 that transformed the state from a non enforcing to an enforcing state as a quasinatural experiment to estimate the causal effect of enforcement on startup activity. In a difference-in-difference framework, we find little support for the widely held view that enforcement of non-compete agreements ...
Working Paper
The Effects of U.S. Public R&D on Global Growth
This paper provides the first causal estimates of the global social returns to U.S. public R&D. We use a narrative identification strategy to quantify the effects of exogenous shocks to U.S. R&D appropriations on the dynamic TFP response of 69 foreign economies from 1980–2019. A U.S. R&D appropriations shock equal to 1 percent of the federal R&D capital stock raises foreign TFP by approximately 1 percent after 12 years. This response is driven primarily by nondefense rather than defense R&D and is concentrated in non-OECD economies. These patterns are most consistent with diffusion ...
Working Paper
A Narrative Analysis of Federal Appropriations for Research and Development
This paper provides a narrative analysis of postwar federal appropriations for the research and development (R&D) activities of the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation—five agencies that consistently account for the vast majority of federal outlays for all types of R&D. We build a novel dataset quantifying the enacted full-year appropriations for all budgetary accounts funding R&D activities at these five agencies over fiscal years 1947-2019. We use this dataset to isolate a ...
Working Paper
Firm Entry and Exit and Aggregate Growth
Applying the Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (FHK) (2001) decomposition to plant-level manufacturing data from Chile and Korea, we find that the entry and exit of plants account for a larger fraction of aggregate productivity growth during periods of fast GDP growth. Studies of other countries confirm this empirical relationship. To analyze this relationship, we develop a simple model of firm entry and exit based on Hopenhayn (1992) in which there are analytical expressions for the FHK decomposition. When we introduce reforms that reduce entry costs or reduce barriers to technology adoption ...