Using Scientific Publications to Evaluate Government R&D Spending: The Case of Energy

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Government spending on research and development of alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power is growing around the world. Many of these technologies are still too costly to be competitive with fossil fuels without some public support. Yet assessing the effectiveness of the research support is complex, particularly because there is a mix of both public and private research funding. In addition, because government support is for basic, rather than directly applied research, there is a long lag between research results and the development of the final commercialized product, so it may take a number of years for its effect on technology to be realized. This project addresses three research questions in this context: First, how does government R&D affect the returns to basic research? Second, are there diminishing returns to government R&D support, so that increases in R&D support less fruitful projects? Third, what is the impact of these publications on applied research? The project builds a database that uses data on scientific publications from the U.S., Japan, and Europe to assess the effect of government-sponsored energy R&D. Intellectual Merit: The project develops a new theoretical framework for evaluating government R&D which enables the study of marginal as well as average affects. It also creates a unique data base to answer these important questions by linking publication data to citations on U.S. energy patents. The database enables important questions to be addressed, such as examining how long it takes for publications to be cited by a patent and what information is most useful to the development of new technology. Broader Impacts: The research could potentially be used to provide guidelines to help allocate government research dollars more effectively. The broader impacts to society at large is thus in the form of potential changes in energy and climate policy. More broadly, evidence on the potential for diminishing returns to government funding due to adjustment costs informs not only energy R&D policy, but also proposals for research funding increases in other sectors.