TY - JOUR
T1 - Economic analysis of scientific publications and implications for energy research and development
AU - Popp, David
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by NSF grant # SMA-1064161. J. E. Kim, Q. Miao and T. Tang all provided excellent research assistance on this project. I thank A. Toole and seminar participants at Syracuse University, Resources for the Future, and the London School of Economics for helpful comments on earlier versions of this research. Finally, I thank A. Kushmerick and L. Seltzer of Thomson Reuters for their assistance in obtaining the publication data used in this paper. Certain data included herein are derived from the Web of Science prepared by THOMSON REUTERS, Inc. (Thomson), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA: Copyright THOMSON REUTERS 2012. All rights reserved. Thomson Reuters reserves the right to review the paper before dissemination to ensure that the confidentiality of the data is not unintentionally compromised.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited.
PY - 2016/4
Y1 - 2016/4
N2 - The mix of public and private funding in alternative energy research makes isolating the effect of government funding challenging. Factors such as energy prices and environmental policy influence both private and public R&D decisions, and it may take several years for public R&D’s effect on technology to be realized. Here, by combining data on scientific publications for alternative energy technologies with data on government R&D support, I provide information on the lags between research funding and new publications and link these articles to citations in US energy patents. I find that US$1 million in additional government funding leads to one to two additional publications, but with lags as long as ten years between initial funding and publication. Finally, I show that adjustment costs associated with large increases in research funding are of little concern at current levels of public energy R&D support. These results suggest that there is room to expand public R&D budgets for renewable energy, but that the impact of any such expansion may not be realized for some time.
AB - The mix of public and private funding in alternative energy research makes isolating the effect of government funding challenging. Factors such as energy prices and environmental policy influence both private and public R&D decisions, and it may take several years for public R&D’s effect on technology to be realized. Here, by combining data on scientific publications for alternative energy technologies with data on government R&D support, I provide information on the lags between research funding and new publications and link these articles to citations in US energy patents. I find that US$1 million in additional government funding leads to one to two additional publications, but with lags as long as ten years between initial funding and publication. Finally, I show that adjustment costs associated with large increases in research funding are of little concern at current levels of public energy R&D support. These results suggest that there is room to expand public R&D budgets for renewable energy, but that the impact of any such expansion may not be realized for some time.
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U2 - 10.1038/NENERGY.2016.20
DO - 10.1038/NENERGY.2016.20
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85136221713
SN - 2058-7546
VL - 1
JO - Nature Energy
JF - Nature Energy
IS - 4
M1 - 16020
ER -