Pop-Up Journal on the Returns to R&D

The primary US statistical series on R&D performance and funding, including the Business Enterprise Research and Development survey and the Higher Education R&D survey.

Coverage: 1953 to present, annual

Treats R&D as investment within the national accounts framework, which is the series most estimates of aggregate R&D capital stocks are built from.

Coverage: 1929 to present, annual

Project-level records for NIH-funded research, including linked publications and patents. The basis for much of the quasi-experimental work on public funding.

Coverage: 1985 to present

Disambiguated inventor, assignee, and citation data for US patents, used to trace spillovers between firms and from public research.

Coverage: 1976 to present

Research Costs and Social Returns: Hybrid Corn and Related Innovations

Journal of Political Economy 66(5), 419 to 431.

The paper that started the measurement tradition this journal is named for. Griliches put a number on the social return to a single research programme and found it far above the private return.

Issues in Assessing the Contribution of Research and Development to Productivity Growth

Bell Journal of Economics 10(1), 92 to 116.

Sets out the identification problems that still shape the field, above all the difficulty of separating a firm's own R&D from the spillovers it receives.

Social and Private Rates of Return from Industrial Innovations

Quarterly Journal of Economics 91(2), 221 to 240.

The first systematic case-study evidence that social returns exceed private returns across a sample of innovations rather than in a single industry.

Measuring the Social Return to R&D

Quarterly Journal of Economics 113(4), 1119 to 1135.

Shows that conventional regression estimates should be read as a lower bound on the optimal level of R&D investment, which reframed how the literature interprets its own numbers.

Identifying Technology Spillovers and Product Market Rivalry

Econometrica 81(4), 1347 to 1393.

Separates the two forces that pull in opposite directions, technology spillovers and business stealing, and finds the spillover effect dominates.