PS - for the interested folks out there who are not PhD students or academics, this course isn’t designed for you. Instead, may I recommend the IFP metascience 101 podcast series! ifp.org/the-metascie...

Apply by January 9, 2026 (this Friday!) for consideration. Be sure to share with the less online students you know. We welcome applications from anyone who has completed the equivalent of a first year economics PhD. ifp.org/economics-of...

11. Competition and Innovation, Mitsuru Igami
12. Patent Policy, Janet Freilich
13. Advice on Research and Careers, panel of Caleb Watney, Heidi Williams, Matt Clancy

6. Science and the Returns to R&D, Matt Clancy (me)
7. AI and Innovation, Kevin Bryan
8. Innovation Policy, John Van Reenen
9. Immigration and Innovation, Michael Clemens
10. Regulation, Heidi Williams

Schedule:
1. Introduction to the economics of Idea, Ben Jones
2. Idea-based models of economic growth, Chad Jones
3. The supply of Innovators, Ina Ganguli
4. Open Science as an Economic Institution, Pierre Azoulay
5. The Direction of Science, Kyle Myers

The course runs from early February through late March. Each week is an interactive zoom lecture from a different expert in the relevant field, plus a meeting with a small group of other students to discuss assigned readings.

Thanks Brian!

You can read the full paper here. It’s short and I think pretty transparent!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We find that drugs that cite at-risk research are, on average, no less likely to get priority reviews at FDA and do not have worse implied valuations by the stock market. In short, we don’t have reason to believe drugs linked to at-risk research are worse.

Are drugs linked to at-risk research worse? We look at two proxies for drug value: whether a drug gets priority review at the FDA, and stock market reactions when a drug patent is announced. Yes, very imperfect, but we think still worth looking at.

Finally, it’s less common, but in some cases, drugs directly acknowledge support from specific NIH grants in their patents. Only 40 drugs acknowledge NIH grant support, but of that group, 14 (35%) acknowledge support from a grant that is at-risk.

We consider other ways to link drugs with at-risk grants. For example, we find that 12% of drugs have more than a quarter of their patent-to-paper citations going to at-risk research. See the paper for some examples of specific drugs.

This doesn’t mean 51% of drugs wouldn’t exist if the NIH had been 40% smaller. Various caveats cut in different ways (see discussion in the online appendix). But we take this as evidence that the benefits of at-risk NIH research are wide and diffuse.

Most new drugs are protected by patents. We look at these patents to see if they cite research funded by at-risk grants. We find 51% of drugs have a patent that cites one or more articles funded by an at-risk grant.

Would anyone miss the research funded by these at-risk grants? To help assess that, we link these at-risk grants to drugs, focusing on all 557 FDA approvals for new molecular entities approved in the 21st century.

We have the real priority scores for all NIH grants made over 1980-2007. Since NIH mostly funds research by working down these priority scores until the budget runs out, we can identify the grants that would probably have been cut with a smaller budget.