Replication files for "The Impact of Money on Science."

Published: 28 September 2019| Version 1 | DOI: 10.17632/knrhmnz234.1
Contributors:
Thomas Wollmann,

Description

This dataset replicates tables and figures in the article "The Impact of Money on Science." The paper measures the productivity of university research investments and asks whether the resulting pools of knowledge create valuable, downstream technology (or simply accumulate in the “ivory tower”). It uses unexpected NCAA athletic outcomes to vary research support to university faculty and estimate knowledge productivity. We find positive, significant effects of research expenditures on articles published and patents filed. Then, using data on university technology licensing income, we show that these investments produce large returns in real terms. The data consists of an instrument, inputs, and outputs (from the knowledge production process). -The instrument consists of Associated Press college football team rankings. -The inputs the knowledge production function consist of the following: * research support expenditures (downloaded from the National Science Foundation) * faculty headcounts and expenditures (also downloaded from the National Science Foundation) * physical capital, i.e. facility expenditures (downloaded from IPEDS) - The outputs measure patenting, publishing, and licensing activity * Patent data comes from PatentsView.org (http://www.patentsview.org) and the USPTO Office of the Chief Economist. * Publishing activity is measured by academic publications, mainly in the ``STEM'' fields * University technology licensing revenues are surveyed and published by Association of University Technology Managers (``AUTM'') More details on the construction of these measures can be found in the associated article. Name correspondences are provided in an Excel file (nameMerge.xlsx). Code that combines the data from the subfolders and replicates the relevant tables and figures of the paper is provided in a STATA "do" file (master_final.do). Output files are exported to the "output" subfolder.

Files

Steps to reproduce

Due to their relatively small size and/or non-proprietary nature, the source files pertaining to team rankings, faculty expenditures, and other human capital expenditures are provided in the relevant folders. For the construction of the other measures, please see Section 3 of the body of the paper and Section 2 of the Online Appendix of "The Impact of Money on Science: Evidence from Unexpected NCAA Football Outcomes."

Categories

Public Economics, Production Economics, Knowledge Development, Production Cost

Licence