Acquiring Knowledge Within and Across Firm Boundaries: Evidence from Clinical Development

Considerable evidence suggests that information is acquired more easily within than across firm boundaries. I explore why this is observed in the setting of clinical development. Since the mid-1980s, pharmaceutical firms have partly contracted out the operational aspects of clinical trials to Contract Research Organizations (CROs). Using detailed project-level data for 53 firms, I document that even after controlling for a number of alternative explanations, knowledge-intensive projects are more likely to be assigned to internal teams, while data-intensive projects are more likely to be outsourced. The statistical exercise is complemented by in-depth interviews with six pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. The qualitative evidence confirms that incentives for knowledge and data production are more easily kept in balance in the firm's own internal labor market than in that of its suppliers. Moreover, firms use relational contracts to ensure that their employees' incentives are both balanced and relatively high-powered.

The Determinants of Faculty Patenting Behavior: Demographics or Opportunities?

We examine the individual, contextual, and institutional determinants of faculty patenting behavior in a panel dataset spanning the careers of 3,884 academic life scientists. Using a combination of discrete time hazard rate models and fixed effects logistic models, we find that patenting events are preceded by a flurry of publications, even holding constant time-invariant scientific talent and the latent patentability of a scientist's research. Moreover, the magnitude of the effect of this flurry is influenced by context --- such as the presence of coauthors who patent and the patent stock of the scientist's university. Whereas previous research emphasized that academic patenters are more accomplished on average than their non-patenting counterparts, our findings suggest that patenting behavior is also a function of scientific opportunities. This result has important implications for the public policy debate surrounding academic patenting.

PublicationHarvester: An Open-Source Software Tool for Science Policy Research

We present PublicationHarvester, an open-source software tool for gathering publication information on individual life scientists. The software interfaces with MEDLINE, and allows the end-user to specify up to four MEDLINE-formatted names for each researcher. Using these names along with a user-specified search query, PublicationHarvester generates yearly publication counts, optionally weighted by Journal Impact Factors. These counts are further broken-down by order on the authorship list (first, last, second, next-to-last, middle) and by publication type (clinical trials, regular journal articles, reviews, letters/editorials, etc.) The software also generates a keywords report at the scientist-year level, using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) assigned by the National Library of Medicine to each publication indexed by Medline. The software, source code, and user manual can be downloaded at http://www.stellman-greene.com/PublicationHarvester/

Africa: Some thoughts on how to tackle the water crisis

LSE alumna Anaelle Azoulay discusses how a new project aimed at providing access to clean water could inspire other entrepreneurs to address international development issues

Online media in Africa: a new powerful public sphere to counter stereotypes

LSE MSc student Anaelle Azoulay shares her reflections on Sean Jacobs’s Public Lecture ‘Shifting African Digital Landscapes’ on 17th March 2015 (chaired by Dr Wendy Willems). Remember Kony 2012? A short film launched by Invisible Children that went viral by trying to expose Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony and get him arrested. While the intention was laudable, the campaign came under valid criticisms. The much too simplistic storytelling of events in the region was one of the main criticisms the campaign received. More broadly, this campaign reflects western media appetite for sensationalism and western-centric approaches for dealing with complex issues happening outside of campaigners’ own borders or range of knowledge. As Sean Jacobs, Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York and founder of the blog Africa is a country, puts it

The Medo-Persian Ceremonial: Xenophon, Cyrus and the King's Body

The Cyropaedia is a long text involving many different approaches; and yet there is a major split in the work: the taking of Babylon which, at the end of Book 7, marks the end of Cyrus' military conquest. Indeed, while throughout the first part, the young conqueror was at the head of a kind of "travelling Republic" and was deliberately rejecting the slightest display of luxury, the circumstances turn to be entirely different with the defeat and the fall of the enemy capital town. Cyrus settles down in the palace under Hestia's patronage. The last conquests are swiftly reported in just a few sentences. And then, a crucial pattern appears, the development of which gives a framework to the whole beginning of Book 8: the notion that the sovereign must be very parsimonious and cautious in his public appearances. From then on, the conqueror decides to wear the Median dress, as well as shoes with thick soles, and to make up his eyes.For a long time, scholars have been puzzled by this adoption of Eastern pomp – apparently praised by Xenophon. In order to elude the questions raised by this part of the text, some doubts have sometimes been expressed as to its authenticity. Some interpreters have also avoided the problem by assuming that Xenophon mentioned this episode in order to suggest that he was himself keeping his hero at a distance for moral reasons. I will assume here that this adoption of a foreign ceremonial by Xenophon's hero has a political meaning, and not a moral one. The adoption of Eastern pomp is a new governmental technê, which is related to Cyrus' settling in his palace; it is also linked to his wish to deal with issues of imperial deportment and of territorial security and no longer with military problems. For Xenophon, the problem is to find a good and exact balance between what is required by the ruling of such a huge empire – which obliges the ruler to resort to luxurious pomp – and those requirements imposed by the ruling of his own body – and, especially, the necessary inner asceticism of a good leader

Let’s look up from our phones, that’s where actual innovations might be!

Polis Intern and LSE MSc student Anaelle Azoulay reports on the latest Polis Media Agenda Talk featuring Dr Norman Lewis. “I don’t care if you have landed a spacecraft on a comet, you are sexist”. This is how Matt Taylor, a British scientist who succeeded in landing the Philae spacecraft on a comet located about 300 million miles from Earth (which had never been done before) got rewarded in the virtual sphere for his achievement. Talking about the mission on camera, Taylor was wearing a T-shirt depicting images of semi-clothed women. This suddenly became what he stands for

Social Influence Given (Partially) Deliberate Matching: Career Imprints in the Creation of Academic Entrepreneurs

Actors often match with associates on a small set of dimensions that matter most for the particular relationship at hand. In so doing, they are exposed to unanticipated social influences because counterparts have more interests, attitudes, and preferences than would-be associates considered when they first chose to pair. This implies that some apparent social influences (those tied to the rationales for forming the relationship) are endogenous to the matching process, while others (those that are incidental to the formation of the relationship) may be conditionally exogenous, thus enabling causal estimation of peer effects. We illustrate this idea in a new dataset tracking the training and professional activities of academic biomedical scientists. In qualitative and quantitative analyses, we show that scientists match to their postdoctoral mentors based on two dominant factors, geography and scientific focus. They then adopt their advisers' orientations toward commercial science as evidenced by the transmission of patenting behavior, but they do not match on this dimension. We demonstrate this in two-stage models that adjust for the endogeneity of the matching process, using a modification of propensity score estimation and a sample selection correction with valid exclusion restrictions. Furthermore, we draw on qualitative accounts of the matching process recorded in oral histories of the career choices of the scientists in our data. All three methods-qualitative description, propensity score estimators, and those that tackle selection on unobservable factors-are potential approaches to establishing evidence of social influence in partially endogenous networks, and they may be especially persuasive in combination.

Consumption Externalities and Diffusion in Pharmaceutical Markets: Antiulcer Drugs

We examine the role of consumption externalities in the demand for pharmaceuticals at both the brand level and over a therapeutic class of drugs. These effects emerge when use of a drug by others affects its value, and/or conveys information abut efficacy and safety to patients and physicians. This can affect that rate of market diffusion for a new entrant, and can lead to herb behavior whereby a particular drug can dominate the market despite the availability of close substitutes. We use data for H2-antagonist antiulcer drugs to estimate a dynamic demand model and quantify these effects. The model has three components: an hedonic price equation that measures how the aggregate usage of a drug, as well as conventional attributes, affect brand valuation; equations relating equilibrium market shares to quality-adjusted prices and marketing levels; and diffusion equations describing the dynamic adjustment process. We find that consumption externalities influence both valuations and rates of diffusion, but that they operate at the brand and not the therapeutic class level.