Essays on health and innovation economics

This dissertation comprises three chapters that study topics within health and innovation economics, and their intersection. The first chapter studies a US federal program and its intention to increase university patenting. In the 1960s and 1970s the United States government enacted policies to transfer patent title from federally funded research to the universities where that research was conducted. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare entered into 49 Institutional Patent Agreements (IPAs) with universities from 1968 to 1977, which removed barriers to patenting federally funded research. In this paper, I study the effect that IPAs had on patenting at the university level. Although university patenting increased by nearly ten-fold over this time period, I find no effect that these IPAs differentially increased patenting. I discuss the historical context of university patenting and technology transfer, and why these patenting agreements might not have had much causal effect on university patenting. The second chapter studies the role of state tax variation and physician location choice. How tax changes affect behavior is a central question in public and labor economics. An empirical literature has developed studying whether regional or international tax changes induce workers to move to lower tax locations, and in this paper I extend this literature to the setting of physicians in the United States. The geographic distribution of physicians is a key area to study given policy questions related to an unequal dispersion of physician labor across the country. I construct a panel of physician practice locations using publicly available Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data. In my baseline estimates I find economically small but imprecisely estimated tax elasticities of mobility, which prevents comparisons with elasticity estimates from other labor markets. I explore heterogeneity by physician demographic characteristics, and discuss lessons from this paper that can be used in future research on the topic of physicians and their location choice. The third chapter, coauthored with Carolyn Stein with joint contributions in all sections, studies a component of university researcher salaries without widespread measurement. ``Soft money'' is the requirement for researchers to pay at least part of their own salary from extramural grants. Many have argued based on qualitative evidence that soft money has impacts on the productivity of scientists, but we actually don't have systematic data or empirical evidence to show soft money's effect one way or the other. A new data opportunity provides us the ability to measure soft money in more detail than in previous studies. In this paper, we document significant soft money salary shares for medical and non-medical tenure-track faculty. We decompose soft money salary shares by faculty demographic characteristics, presenting suggestive evidence that the rise of soft money might have occurred during the NIH budget doubling era in the late 1990s and early 2000s, consistent with observers. We conclude with a discussion of remaining data hurdles, and next steps in this research agenda.

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Einav Liran
WilliamsHeidi
Bloom Nicholas