Measuring the Social Return to R&D

Charles Jones and John Williams

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1998, vol. 113, issue 4, 1119-1135

Abstract: Is there too much or too little research and development (R&D)? In this paper we bridge the gap between the recent growth literature and the empirical productivity literature. We derive in a growth model the relationship between the social rate of return to R&D and the coefficient estimates of the empirical literature and show that these estimates represent a lower bound. Furthermore, our analytic framework provides a direct mapping from the rate of return to the degree of underinvestment in research. Conservative estimates suggest that optimal R&D investment is at least two to four times actual investment.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (477)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/003355398555856 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Measuring the social return to R&D (1997)
Working Paper: Measuring the Social Return to R&D
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:113:y:1998:i:4:p:1119-1135.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().