Working Paper: NBER ID: w14819
Authors: Fiona Murray; Philippe Aghion; Mathias Dewatripont; Julian Kolev; Scott Stern
Abstract: Scientific freedom and openness are hallmarks of academia: relative to their counterparts in industry, academics maintain discretion over their research agenda and allow others to build on their discoveries. This paper examines the relationship between openness and freedom, building on recent models emphasizing that, from an economic perspective, freedom is the granting of control rights to researchers. Within this framework, openness of upstream research does not simply encourage higher levels of downstream exploitation. It also raises the incentives for additional upstream research by encouraging the establishment of entirely new research directions. In other words, within academia, restrictions on scientific openness (such as those created by formal intellectual property (IP)) may limit the diversity and experimentation of basic research itself. We test this hypothesis by examining a "natural experiment" in openness within the academic community: NIH agreements during the late 1990s that circumscribed IP restrictions for academics regarding certain genetically engineered mice. Using a sample of engineered mice that are linked to specific scientific papers (some affected by the NIH agreements and some not), we implement a differences-in-differences estimator to evaluate how the level and type of follow-on research using these mice changes after the NIH-induced increase in openness. We find a significant increase in the level of follow-on research. Moreover, this increase is driven by a substantial increase in the rate of exploration of more diverse research paths. Overall, our findings highlight a neglected cost of IP: reductions in the diversity of experimentation that follows from a single idea.
Keywords: Openness; Innovation; Intellectual Property; Research; Academia
JEL Codes: J30
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| NIH agreements (F53) | follow-on research (C92) |
| NIH agreements (F53) | citation rates for mouse articles (A14) |
| crelox openness shock (F41) | citations from new authors (A14) |
| onco shock (Y70) | citations from new authors (A14) |
| openness shocks (F41) | diversity of research paths (Y80) |
| openness shocks (F41) | citations from new journals (A14) |
| crelox shock (Y60) | basic citations (Y20) |
| onco shock (Y70) | applied citations (A14) |