Early Career Choice, Funding Variation and Scientific Output

年轻的生命科学研究人员在完成博士后学徒期后，可以选择进入学术界，或者加入生物技术或制药公司，开始他们的职业生涯。这些选择显然取决于科学家？个人对薪酬的偏好和研究自主权的程度。然而，职业选择也受到外部限制因素的影响，例如研究经费的可得性和竞争。从历史上看，公共研究经费的数量随着时间的推移而变化，反映了国会的优先事项。该项目将首次提供定量证据，证明迄今为止科学研究的公共资助变化的隐藏成本和潜在效益。研究经费的可变性可能导致人才分配不当，而在预算分配过程中创造更多确定性的改革可能以更低的成本产生更大的社会效益。同时，研究经费的可变性可能会增加学术界和产业界之间的知识传播，对推进科学创新、改善健康和促进经济增长具有潜在的重要政策影响。研究人员利用公共研究资金可获得性的外生变化（包括时间和跨领域的）来检验生物学精英博士后奖学金获得者最初的职业选择。然后在工具变量框架中使用这些职业选择约束来估计这一初始职业选择的长期后果，重点关注专利和出版结果。稀缺的公共研发资金在多大程度上给私营部门公司带来了积极的生产力冲击，这些公司可以更容易地从学术精英中招募到他们的实验室工作人员。

Young life science researchers, after completion of their post-doctoral apprenticeship, may elect to begin their careers by either entering academia, or by joining biotechnology or pharmaceutical firms. These choices clearly depend upon scientist?s individual preferences for salary and degree of research autonomy. However career choice is also affected by external constraints such as the availability of, and competition for, research funding. Historically the amount of public research funding has changed over time reflecting congressional priorities. This project will provide the first quantitative evidence on the heretofore hidden costs and potential benefits of variability in the public funding of science research. Research funding variability may lead to a misallocation of talent and reforms that create more certainty in the budget allocation process could generate greater social benefits at lower costs. At the same time, research funding variability may increase the transmission of knowledge between academia and industry with potentially important policy implications for advancing scientific innovation, improving health and promoting economic growth. Exogenous variation in the availability of public funding for research (both over time and across fields) is used to examine the initial career choice of recipients of elite postdoctoral fellowships in biology. These career choice constraints are then used in an instrumental variables framework to estimate the long-run consequences of this initial career choice, with a focus on both patent and publication outcomes. The degree to which scarce public R&D funding leads to positive productivity shocks for private sector firms who can more readily draw from the academic elite to staff their laboratories will also be directly assessed.