Long-term Effects from Early Exposure to Research: Evidence from the NIH "Yellow Berets''

Pierre Azoulay, Wesley H. Greenblatt and Misty Heggeness

No 26069, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Can a relatively short but intense exposure to frontier research alter the career trajectories of potential innovators? To answer this question, we study the careers and productivity of 3,075 medical school graduates who applied to the Associate Training Programs (ATP) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the turbulent period of the Vietnam War, 1965- 1975. Carefully selecting on observables, we compare physicians who attended the program to those who passed a first admission screen but were ultimately not selected. We find that program participants were twice as likely to choose a research-focused position after training, and considerably less likely to switch to purely clinical endeavors as their careers unfolded. Over the life cycle, NIH trainees also garnered publications, citations, and grant funding at a much higher rate than synthetic controls, and went on to mentor more trainees who them- selves became successful researchers. The direction of their research efforts was durably imprinted by their training experience. In particular, NIH trainees appear to have acquired a distinct “translational” style of biomedical research which became an implicit training model for physician-scientists as ATP alumni came to occupy the commanding heights of academic medicine throughout the United States.

JEL-codes: I23 I26 M53 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-sea
Note: PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Pierre Azoulay & Wesley H. Greenblatt & Misty L. Heggeness, 2021. "Long-term effects from early exposure to research: Evidence from the NIH “Yellow Berets”," Research Policy, vol 50(9).

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26069.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Long-term effects from early exposure to research: Evidence from the NIH “Yellow Berets” (2021)
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:nbr:nberwo:26069

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26069

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().