Trends in and influence of regional federally funded research and development in the US

Over the last few decades, although US gross domestic spending on Research and Development (R&D) as a percentage of GDP has risen from around 2.27% in 1981 to 2.74% in 2016, federal funding for R&D has fallen steadily, from 1.19% to o.81% over the same period. These changes reflect a broader shift in the US from a government-driven R&D model to a business-driven model. Towards the goal of identifying the regional economic impacts of federally funded R&D, I first build on previous work to develop a method to obtain federal funding for R&D at granular geographic levels using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to automatically classify open data on federal contracts and grants as R&D or non-R&D awards. This method results in a 95% accuracy rate in classifying federal awards, and covers 56% of US federal R&D obligations made in the year 2016. As underreporting issues in the data source are addressed, this method will yield higher coverage rates, thus creating a unique dataset that affords opportunities to study the regional impacts of federally funded R&D. Next, I adapt Hausman, N. (2012). University Innovation, Local Economic Growth, and Entrepreneurship to identify the employment-generation effects of federally funded university R&D and compare impacts of overall R&D funding to the employment-generation arising from R&D funding provided to specific academic disciplines. I find that the employment-generation effects of federally funded computer science R&D are significant and much more pronounced than the corresponding effects of overall federally funded university R&D.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Gadgin Matha, Shreyas

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jonathan Gruber.

• Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.
• Technology and Policy Program.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/117893

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/117893