Abstract
Government policies like the Advanced Technology Program (“ATP”) are intended, at least in part, to remedy the “market failure” inherent in the fact that a significant portion of the social benefits of new knowledge and technology are not captured by a firm that invests in R&D. ATP’s project selection, and its evaluation of the impact of its program, can be made more effective by explicitly incorporating the analysis of such “spillovers.” For project selection, this means identifying technological, organizational and economic factors that tend to oint to a large “spillover gap,” or deviation between the social and private rates of return to a proposed project. For program evaluation and assessment, it means adapting existing study methods that measure social returns to innovation in ways that explicitly capture spillover effects.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Bresnahan, T. “Measuring the Spillovers from Technical Advance: Mainframe Computers in Financial Services.”American Economic Review, September 1986.
Cohen, Wesley, and Daniel Levinthal. “Innovation and Learning: The Two Faces of R&D.”Economic Journal, 1989.
General Accounting Office.Performance Measurement: Efforts to Evaluate the Advanced Technology Program. GAO.RCED-95-68, 1995.
General Accounting Office.Measuring Performance: The Advanced Technology Program and Private-Sector Funding. GAO/RCED-96-47, 1996.
Griliches, Zvi. “The Search for R&D Spillovers.”Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 1993.
Jaffe, Adam B. “Technological Opportunity and Spillovers of R&D.”American Economic Review 76, December 1986, pp. 984–1001.
Krugman, Paul.Geography and Trade. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1991.
Levin, Richard C., Alvin Klevorick, Richard Nelson, and Sidney Winter. “Appropriating the Returns from Industrial Research and Development.”Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1987, pp. 783–831.
Mansfield, Edwin, J. Rapoport, A. Romeo, S. Wagner, and G. Beardsley. “Social and Private Rates of Return From Industrial Innovations.”Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1977.
Marshall, Alfred.Principles of Economics. London: Macmillan, 1920.
Trajtenberg, Manuel.Economic Analysis of Product Innovation: The Case of CT Scanners. Harvard University Press, 1990.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
This paper is based on a study that I performed for the ATP, Economic Analysis of Research Spillovers: Implications for the Advanced Technology Program, NIST GCR 97-708. I have benefited from comments and useful discussions with Zvi Griliches, Jeanne Powell, Rosalie Ruegg, and Richard Spivack. Some of the ideas in this paper grew out of previous joint research with James Adams. The views expressed herein are my own, however, and should not be attributed to any of these individuals or to the ATP.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jaffe, A.B. The importance of “spillovers” in the policy mission of the advanced technology program. J Technol Transfer 23, 11–19 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02509888
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02509888