The Long-Term Regional Economic Impacts from Public Investment in University Research

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This project creates a new database of county-level productivity of manufacturing firms from 1947 to 1992. These historical data have been published in the Manufacturing Census reports, but are not yet electronically available. This data-collection project offers the first electronically-available information on U.S. manufacturing at the county level over a fairly long period of time. Data on 24 industries, across roughly 3,143 counties, over 10 Manufacturing Census years (1947, 1954, 1958, 1963, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, and 1992) yields 754,320 county-industry-year observations of cost, quantity, and productivity.The investigators' ultimate goal is to construct a body of data that will enable them to examine how publicly-funded scientific knowledge flows across locations, and how these knowledge flows affect the development of regional economies -- thus advancing the understanding of the returns to public investment in scientific university research. The data collected under the auspices of this grant will facilitate a study of how investments in Cold-War and Space Race-era science impacted regional economies from 1947 to 1992. Research into this important historical episode in the ascendency of the modern American research university (and a period of overall economic growth for the nation, punctuated by economic and political crises) will help to uncover the extent to which the broad economic effects of public investment in university science last for many decades or are simply transitory. Through documenting changes over time in cost, efficiency, and productivity, the data will also help to shed light on the channels through which university knowledge benefits the private manufacturing sector. Broader impacts: The panel database on the productivity of American manufacturers in the Cold War and Space Race periods is useful to a wide range of scholars interested in the direct and indirect impacts of science and technology policy at the local level and in the path of U.S. economic development more generally. The research will extend a database on the economics of American research universities developed under prior NSF support to provide an inventory of scientific capital and personnel at each university and thus an estimate of the historical capacity of these universities to absorb new scientific funding. The need to generate a consistent panel of industry-county data provides financial support for an undergraduate research assistant.