Climbing atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research

By Jeffrey L. Furman, Scott Stern. The American Economic Review, 2011

355 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While cumulative knowledge production is central to growth, little empirical research investigates how institutions shape whether existing knowledge can be exploited to create new knowledge. This paper assesses the impact of a specific institution, a biological resource center, whose objective is to certify and disseminate knowledge. We disentangle the marginal impact of this institution on cumulative research from the impact of selection, in which the most important discoveries are endogenously linked to research-enhancing institutions. Exploiting exogenous shifts of biomaterials across institutional settings and employing a difference-in-differences approach, we find that effective institutions amplify the cumulative impact of individual scientific discoveries. (JEL D02, D83, I23, O30)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0de280f7ab40da7711bdcc36027289fc648a117

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Citations in the corpus

Does Patent Strategy Shape the Long-Run Supply of Public Knowledge? Evidence from Human Genetics (2009, methodology): “More salient for our analysis, Furman and Stern (2006) explored whether depositing into biological resource centers enabling biological materials linked to specific publications increases the cumulative public knowledge stream measured with citations.”
GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBOURS: A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF AN INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATORY INSTITUTION (2018, neutral): “…recent years that growing awareness of research in other fields and increasing recognition of the importance of protecting common resources has caused management scholars to take a more active interest in self-regulatory institutions (Furman & Stern, 2006; Jiang & Bansal, 2003; King & Lenox, 2000).”
Frontier Knowledge and Scientific Production: Evidence from the Collapse of International Science (2018, background): “For example, materials that have been deposited in biological resource centers, which collect and distribute biological material, are more likely to be used in follow-on research (Furman and Stern, 2011).”
The Career Effects of Scandal: Evidence from Scientific Retractions (2017, neutral): “…science (Merton 1957).13 We follow in the footsteps of prior scholarship in the economics of science in using an information shock to trace out the effect of this shock on the citation trajectories of scientific articles published before the shock (e.g., Furman and Stern 2011; Azoulay et al. 2015).”
Open Access to Data: An Ideal Professed but Not Practised (2014, background): “9 See also Furman and Stern (2011) for a recent analysis of the impact institutions ave on knowledge diffusion and knowledge accumulation when they lower the osts of access to knowledge.”
Information-Sharing in Academia and the Industry: A Comparative Study (2011, background): “For example, in a recent tudy, Furman and Stern (2008) show that in the field of biology, cientists who give access to their material are cited more freuently in related publications.”
Treatment effect identification using alternative parallel assumptions (2012, background): “Furman and Stern (2011): They study the e ect of biological resource centers (BRC) on knowledge accumulation.”
Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast- and Slow-paced Domains* (2018, methodology): “Following previous studies (e.g., Furman and Stern, 2011; Azoulay, Stuart, and Wang, 2013; Vakili and McGahan, 2016), we used the number of citations each publication received in subsequent publications by 2014 to construct a citation-weighted count of publications per mathematician per year.6 Each…”
The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research (2015, background): “Nonetheless, economic research also has shown that standardization and auditing of biological materials—through biological resource centers—can enhance cumulative production of scientific knowledge by improving both availability and reliability of research inputs [28].”
Alternative diff-in-diffs estimators with several pretreatment periods (2019, background): “For Furman and Stern (2011), our estimates are to be comparedwith those in the second column in their Table 3.”
Contracting Over the Disclosure of Scientific Knowledge: Intellectual Property and Academic Publication (2017, neutral): “Instead, knowledge disclosure relies upon a complex and interaction set of institutions to provide incentives for one generation of knowledge producers to reveal their ideas and enable spillovers for the next (Dasgupta and David, 1994; Furman and Stern, 2010).”
Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance, Novelty, and Resource Allocation in Science (2016, background): “…approach to solving the problem—that is then incrementally refined through a continuous series of cumulative, incremental advances (e.g., Kuhn 1962, Dosi 1982, Sahal 1985, Romer 1990, Gibbons et al. 1994, Murray and O’Mahony 2007, Furman and Stern 2011, Williams 2013, Boudreau and Lakhani 2015).”