New Things Under the Sun

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlatio

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlatio

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlatio

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlatio

Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past few centuries, but much of that progress is still limited to the richest countries. Why don't new technologies spread quickly throughout the world, benefiting billions of people? In this podcast, we’ll focus on one particular answer: new technologies improve productivity, but they improve productivity more when paired w

Correction: In this podcast, I misspoke towards the end and referred to Eesley and Lee (2020) as Eesley and Wang (a 2017 paper I wrote about earlier here). Apologies to the authors.A lot of particularly interesting innovation happens at startups. Suppose we want more of this. One way we could try to get more is by giving entrepreneurship training to people who are likely to found i

Here’s a striking fact: through 2022, one in two Nobel prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine also had a Nobel prize winner as their academic advisor.undefinedWhat accounts for this extraordinary transmission rate of scientific excellence? In this podcast I’ll focus one potential explanation: what do we know about how innovative teachers influence their students, and

Much of the world’s population lives in countries in which little research happens. Is this a problem? According to classical economic models of the “ideas production function,” ideas are universal; ideas developed in one place are applicable everywhere. This is probably true enough for some contexts; but not all. In this post we’ll look at four domains - agriculture, healt

This week, Arnaud Dyèvre (@ArnaudDyevre) and I follow up on a previous podcast, where we documented a puzzle: larger firms conduct R&D at the same rate as smaller firms, despite getting fewer (and more incremental) innovations per R&D dollar. Why wouldn’t firms decelerate their research spending as the return on R&D apparently declines? In this follow-up podcast, we

How do academic researchers decide what to work on? Part of it comes down to what you judge to be important and valuable; and that can come from exposure to problems in your local community. This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article "Geography and What Gets Researched", originally published on New Things Under the Sun.