Innovation Policy and the Economy

Talent is the most precious resource for today’s knowledge-based economy, and a significant share of the US skilled workforce in technology fields is foreign born. The United States has long held a leading position in attracting global talent, but the gap between the United States and other countries is shrinking. Immigration policies like the H-1B visa program shape the admissions of foreign workers to the country and grant a particularly strong gatekeeping role to sponsoring firms and universities. This chapter explores the data around global talent flows and some of the economic implications of an employer-driven immigration approach.

A defining feature of modern economic growth is the systematic application of science to advance technology. However, despite sustained progress in scientific knowledge, recent productivity growth in the United States has been disappointing. We review major changes in the American innovation ecosystem over the past century. The past three decades have been marked by a growing division of labor between universities focusing on research and large corporations focusing on development. Knowledge produced by universities is not often in a form that can be readily digested and turned into new goods and services. Small firms and university technology transfer offices cannot fully substitute for corporate research, which had previously integrated multiple disciplines at the scale required to solve significant technical problems. Therefore, whereas the division of innovative labor may have raised the volume of science by universities, it has also slowed, at least for a period of time, the transformation of that knowledge into novel products and processes.

This chapter provides an overview of different innovation policies and their performance in the pharmaceutical sector. I emphasize three points. First, both push and pull policies have generally promoted pharmaceutical research for diseases with large burdens. Second, imperfections in product and capital markets undermine the efficiency of pull policies. Similarly, the allocation of public funds is not always optimal, which limits the efficacy of push policies. Finally, interactions with other domestic policies and with policies in other countries are often overlooked in both economic studies of pharmaceutical research and development as well as policy choices.

The goal of antitrust policy is to protect and promote a vigorous competitive process. Effective rivalry spurs firms to introduce new and innovative products, as they seek to capture profitable sales from their competitors and to protect their existing sales from future challengers. In this fundamental way, competition promotes innovation. We apply this basic insight to the antitrust treatment of horizontal mergers and of exclusionary conduct by dominant firms. A merger between rivals internalizes business-stealing effects arising from their parallel innovation efforts and thus tends to depress innovation incentives. Merger-specific synergies, such as the internalization of involuntary spillovers or an increase in the productivity of R&D, may offset the adverse effect of a merger on innovation. We describe the possible effects of a merger on innovation by developing a taxonomy of cases, with reference to recent US and EU examples. A dominant firm may engage in exclusionary conduct to eliminate the threat from disruptive firms. This suppresses innovation by foreclosing disruptive rivals and by reducing the pressure to innovative on the incumbent. We apply this broad principle to possible exclusionary strategies by dominant firms.

Experimental approaches are increasingly being adopted across many policy fields, but innovation policy has been lagging. This paper reviews the case for policy experimentation in this field, describes the different types of experiments that can be undertaken, discusses some of the unique challenges to the use of experimental approaches in innovation policy, and summarizes some of the emerging lessons, with a focus on randomized trials. The paper concludes describing how at the Innovation Growth Lab we have been working with governments across the OECD to help them overcome the barriers to policy experimentation to make their policies more impactful.

American technological creativity is geographically concentrated in areas that are generally distant from the country’s most persistent pockets of joblessness. Could a more even spatial distribution of innovation reduce American joblessness? Could federal policies disperse innovation without significant costs? If research funding is already maximizing knowledge production, then spatial reallocation of that funding will reduce America’s overall innovation unless that reallocation comes with greater spending. Without any spatial reallocation, the primarily inventive parts of innovation policy, such as National Institutes of Health grants, can potentially aid underperforming areas by targeting the problems of those areas, such as widespread disability. The educational aspects of innovation policy, such as Pell Grants, work-study, vocational training, and federal overhead reimbursement on grants, currently have multiple objectives and could focus more on employability in distressed areas. Lifting the cap on H-1B visas in poorer places could attract outside human capital to those places. Geographically targeted entrepreneurship policies, such as eliminating the barriers to new business formation near universities and in distressed places, could potentially enhance employment growth in those regions. Spatially targeted employment subsidies will increase the returns to labor-intensive innovation in depressed areas, but we need to know more about how much innovation will respond to such subsidies.