TY  - JOUR
AU  - Azoulay,Pierre
AU  - Zivin,Joshua S. Graff
AU  - Manso,Gustavo
TI  - Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15466
PY  - 2009
Y2  - October 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15466
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15466.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Pierre Azoulay
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-482
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/258-9766
Fax: 617/253-2660
E-Mail: pazoulay@mit.edu

Joshua S. Graff Zivin
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0519
La Jolla, CA 92093-0519
Tel: 858/822-6438
E-Mail: jgraffzivin@ucsd.edu

Gustavo Manso
MIT
Sloan School
E-Mail: manso@mit.edu
AB  - Despite its presumed role as an engine of economic growth, we know surprisingly little about the drivers of scientific creativity. In this paper, we exploit key differences across funding streams within the academic life sciences to estimate the impact of incentives on the rate and direction of scientific exploration. Specifically, we study the careers of investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which tolerates early failure, rewards long-term success, and gives its appointees great freedom to experiment; and grantees from the National Institute of Health, which are subject to short review cycles, pre-defined deliverables, and renewal policies unforgiving of failure. Using a combination of propensity-score weighting and difference-in-differences estimation strategies, we find that HHMI investigators produce high- impact papers at a much higher rate than a control group of similarly-accomplished NIH-funded scientists. Moreover, the direction of their research changes in ways that suggest the program induces them to explore novel lines of inquiry.
ER  -