Lauren Lanahan

Experiments in the Laboratories of Democracy: State Scientific Capacity Building

State initiatives that build innovation capacity by supporting local academic research, attracting eminent scholars, and building research excellence have become prominent among the 50 states over the past 30 years. This article focuses on three programs: University Research Grants, Eminent Scholars, and Centers of Excellence. We include examples for each of the state programs and trace the historical evolution of program attributes. Our objectives are to differentiate program attributes to improve understanding of state science initiatives and to begin to assess how programs contribute to the ultimate goal of creating economic growth. Our empirical analysis demonstrates evidence of the long-term impact of these three programs in building state innovative capacity. The article concludes by outlining how these data may be used in future analyses.

The logic of economic development: a definition and model for investment

Despite significant public resources devoted to promoting innovation and entrepreneurship, there is little agreement about how to measure outcomes toward achieving the larger objectives of economic development. This paper starts by defining economic development and then considers the role of government, arguing that public policy should focus on building capacities that are beyond the ability of the market to provide. This shifts the debate toward a neutral role of government as a builder of capacities that enable economic agents, individuals, firms, or communities to realize their potential.

The domino effects of federal research funding

The extent to which federal investment in research crowds out or decreases incentives for investment from other funding sources remains an open question. Scholarship on research funding has focused on the relationship between federal and industry or, more comprehensively, non-federal funding without disentangling the other sources of research support that include nonprofit organizations and state and local governments. This paper extends our understanding of academic research support by considering the relationships between federal and non-federal funding sources provided by the National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development Survey. We examine whether federal research investment serves as a complement or substitute for state and local government, nonprofit, and industry research investment using the population of research-active academic science fields at U.S. doctoral granting institutions. We use a system of two equations that instruments with prior levels of both federal and non-federal funding sources and accounts for time-invariant academic institution-field effects through first differencing. We estimate that a 1% increase in federal research funding is associated with a 0.411% increase in nonprofit research funding, a 0.217% increase in state and local research funding, and a 0.468% increase in industry research funding, respectively. Results indicate that federal funding plays a fundamental role in inducing complementary investments from other funding sources, with impacts varying across academic division, research capacity, and institutional control.

Focus on State Economic Development Policy

The U.S. federalist structure intentionally distributes the management of public policies across the various levels of government. The federal government places greater attention on issues like defense and monetary policy; state governments have taken the lead on a range of policies that include education and business conduct, whereas local municipalities have directed greater attention to a range of issues that include public works. For some public policies, the appropriate governmental distribution and management is clear. With others, however, the line is not as clearly defined. Economic development policy is among one of these that is of great interest to multiple levels of government. Economic development as a concept is often only loosely defined. This is rather difficult to admit as we oversee this focus issue of Economic Development Quarterly (EDQ), but economic development is simultaneously a theoretical concept—a set of actions and incentives and a professional practice. Often when a term becomes popular it becomes conflated in popular use and the meaning becomes unclear. It was something that the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) felt strongly enough about that we have worked with EDA to put forward a definition, which we would like to offer here:

Does More Certification Always Benefit a Venture

An implicit assumption in institutional theory is that more certifications improve a venture’s likelihood for success. However, under certain conditions, we argue more certifications may be detrimental to the venture’s performance. We advance this notion by examining both who is doing the certification and, in turn, what information is revealed to others through the certification. Our study advances two new constructs based on varying instances of follow-on certification: certification broadening, where the initial and follow-on certifiers are different institutions, and certification redundancy, where the initial and follow-on certifiers are the same institution. By studying sequences of certification in the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research federal and state programs, we find that certification broadening generally increases a firm’s ability to acquire private resources, whereas certification redundancy generally decreases a firm’s ability to acquire private resources. This study advances a more d...

The Matilda Effect: Gender Discrepancies in Productivity of High-Performing Graduate Students

Prior scholarship indicates the gender gap has improved with more equitable matriculation into life science graduate programs. However, the gap persists when considering later-stage professional ou...