Alexander Oettl

The Knowledge Filter and Economic Growth: The Role of Scientist Entrepreneurship

This paper examines the prevalence and determinants of the commercialization of research by university scientists funded by grants from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Because the two publicly available modes of scientist commercialization – patents and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants – do not cover the full spectrum of commercializing activities undertaken by university scientists, the study also includes two additional measures obtained from detailed scientist interviews: licensing of intellectual property and starting a new firm. These measures are used to assess both the prevalence and determinants of scientist commercialization of research. In particular, the empirical findings suggest seven important insights: 1) Scientists receiving funding from the National Cancer Institute exhibit a robust propensity to commercialize their research. However, the prevalence of commercialization depends highly upon the actual mode of commercialization. Some modes of commercialization, such as patents, are more prevalent, while other modes, such as funding by the SBIR program are rarely used. 2) Scientist entrepreneurship is the sleeping giant of commercializing university research. More than one in four patenting NCI scientists have started a new firm. 3) Two paths for commercialization of scientist research are identified - the TTO route and the entrepreneurial route. Scientists who select the TTO route by commercializing their research through assigning all patents to their university TTO account for 70 percent of NCI patenting scientists. Scientists who choose the entrepreneurial route to commercialize their research, in that they do not assign patents to their university TTO, comprise 30 percent of patenting NCI scientists. 4) Social capital enhances the propensity for scientists to commercialize their research. The impact of social capital is particularly high for the commercialization mode of scientist entrepreneurship. 5) Technology Transfer Offices are found to be helpful for the mode of commercialization involving licenses. There is less evidence suggesting that they promote scientist entrepreneurship.6) For scientists who perceive that they are helped by their Technology Transfer Office, licensing is not only the most prevalent mode of commercialization, but it also is a substitute for entrepreneurship. For scientists who perceive that they are not helped by their Technology Transfer Office, entrepreneurship emergences as a much more important mode of commercialization and is complementary to licensing. 7) Scientists choosing the entrepreneurial route to commercialize their research, by not assigning patents to their university to commercialize research, tend to rely on the commercialization mode of entrepreneurship. By contrast, scientists who select the TTO route by assigning their patents to the university tend to rely on the commercialization mode of licensing.

The incidence and role of negative citations in science

Significance Providing a detailed classification of the types of citations that an article receives is important to establish the quality of a study and to characterize how current research builds upon prior work. The methodology that we propose also informs how to improve the citation process, for example by having scientists attach additional metadata to their citations. The approach is scalable to other fields and periods and can also be used to identify other types of citations (e.g., reuse of methods, materials, empirical tests of theory, and so on). Finally, our methods provide online repositories such as Google Scholar, PubMed, ISI Web of Science, and Scopus with a way to improve their search and ranking algorithms. Citations to previous literature are extensively used to measure the quality and diffusion of knowledge. However, we know little about the different ways in which a study can be cited; in particular, are papers cited to point out their merits or their flaws? We elaborated a methodology to characterize “negative” citations using bibliometric data and natural language processing. We found that negative citations concerned higher-quality papers, were focused on a study’s findings rather than theories or methods, and originated from scholars who were closer to the authors of the focal paper in terms of discipline and social distance, but not geographically. Receiving a negative citation was also associated with a slightly faster decline in citations to the paper in the long run.

Roads and Innovation

We exploit historical data on planned highways, railroads, and exploration routes as sources of exogenous variation in order to estimate the effect of interstate highways on regional innovation: a 10% increase in a regions stock of highways causes a 1.7% increase in regional patenting over a five-year period. In terms of the mechanism, we report evidence that roads facilitate local knowledge flows, increasing the likelihood that innovators access knowledge inputs from local but more distant neighbors. Thus, transportation infrastructure may spur regional growth above and beyond the more commonly discussed agglomeration economies predicated on an inflow of new workers.

The Dark Side of Technological Progress? Impact of E-Commerce on Employees at Brick-and-Mortar Retailers

Using an employer-employee payroll dataset for approximately 2.6 million retail workers, we analyze the impact of the staggered rollout of a major e-commerce retailers fulfillment centers on the income and employment of workers at geographically proximate brick-and-mortar retail stores. We find that the establishment of an e-commerce fulfillment center in a county has a negative effect on the income of retail workers in that county and in neighboring counties within 100 miles. Wages of hourly workers, especially part-time hourly workers, decrease significantly. This decrease is driven by a drop in the number of hours worked. We observe a U-shaped pattern in which both young and old workers experience a sharper decrease in wage income. Consequently, in these counties, there is a decrease in credit scores and an increase in delinquency for retail workers that have higher prior credit utilization. Using sales and employment data for 3.2 million stores, we find that retail stores in counties around fulfillment centers experience a reduction in sales and in their number of employees. Further, there is a decrease in entry and an increase in exits for stores in the retail sector, with small and young retail stores exiting at a higher rate. Our robustness tests show that our results are unlikely to be driven by prevailing local economic conditions. Overall, our results highlight the extent to which a dramatic increase in e-commerce retail sales can have some adverse consequences for workers at traditional brick-and-mortar stores.