Motivations for collaborating with industry: has public policy influenced new academics in Argentina?

Between 2005 and 2015 a series of science, technology and innovation policies were deployed in Argentina among which academic research collaborations with industry was particularly fostered. This paper studies the effect of those policies on newer researchers, defined as those with PhD or postdoctoral scholarships, looking at their motivations to collaborate and, to some extent, at their actual collaborations with Industry. Our hypothesis is that those policies had a positive effect on young academics’ perception of collaborations with industry, now conceived as a dimension of their job, and also on actual collaborations. To conduct our study, we used an original database constructed from an online survey answered by more than 600 newer researchers. Empirical results partly confirm our hypothesis: a direct policy encouraging collaborations by providing collaborative grants was not associated with actual collaborations, while orienting research towards strategic areas–defined by the Science and Technology Ministry- is

Anders Hylmö, Disciplined reasoning: Styles of reasoning and the mainstream-heterodoxy divide in Swedish economics. Lunds Universitet, 2018

Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv</p

Why Do Universities Patent? The Role of the Federal Government in Creating Modern Technology Transfer Practice

Academic science, once relatively insulated from market forces, has seen the Mertonian ideal of communistic science partially displaced by an argument that science, in order to be fully applied, must often be privately owned. In keeping with this logic, universities have been patenting faculty inventions in increasing numbers for the last several decades. Much of this increase has traditionally been attributed to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which gave universities an explicit legal mandate to commercialize federally-funded research through patenting. But recent research shows that university patenting was on the rise well before the Bayh-Dole Act and argues that the Act’s impact was not as large as has generally been assumed. This paper claims that state actors were nonetheless critical in creating modern technology transfer practice in universities. I suggest we see the Bayh-Dole Act as the culmination of a larger project of patent policy liberalization that was driven by federal administrators. This project played a significant role in encouraging university patenting through innovative administrative mechanisms and the support of an emerging community of university patent administrators in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Once established, that community in turn allied itself with federal proponents of legislation in the late 1970s in a successful effort to pass BayhDole. Thus the passage of the Act can be seen not as creating modern technology transfer, but as institutionalizing an already-established university patenting community, itself partially a government creation

How Experts Can, and Can’t, Change Policy: Economics, Antitrust, and the Linked Evolution of the Academic and Policy Fields

During the 1970s, U.S. antitrust policy shifted dramatically from a high-enforcement position to a laissez-faire¬ one, where it has largely remained. At the same time, economics displaced law as the dominant form of antitrust expertise. While these developments are related, the former cannot be reduced to the latter: the median position in economics itself shifted from high-enforcement to low-enforcement during this period, and by its end was moving back toward more enforcement. To understand the relationship between these changes, this paper conceptualizes academic economics and antitrust policy as linked fields with relative autonomy. Though economics came to play a key role in antitrust policy, its influence was in some ways limited. The academic field was itself shaped, though not determined, by outside political interests. In addition, not all academically influential ideas translated equally well into policy. A wide range of economists shared a commitment to efficiency as the main purpose of antitrust, however, which delegitimized other historical goals of antitrust policy and constrained political possibilities in lasting ways

Anders Hylmö, Disciplined reasoning: Styles of reasoning and the mainstream-heterodoxy divide in Swedish economics. Lunds Universitet, 2018

Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv</p

Why Do Universities Patent? The Role of the Federal Government in Creating Modern Technology Transfer Practice

Academic science, once relatively insulated from market forces, has seen the Mertonian ideal of communistic science partially displaced by an argument that science, in order to be fully applied, must often be privately owned. In keeping with this logic, universities have been patenting faculty inventions in increasing numbers for the last several decades. Much of this increase has traditionally been attributed to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which gave universities an explicit legal mandate to commercialize federally-funded research through patenting. But recent research shows that university patenting was on the rise well before the Bayh-Dole Act and argues that the Act’s impact was not as large as has generally been assumed. This paper claims that state actors were nonetheless critical in creating modern technology transfer practice in universities. I suggest we see the Bayh-Dole Act as the culmination of a larger project of patent policy liberalization that was driven by federal administrators. This project played a significant role in encouraging university patenting through innovative administrative mechanisms and the support of an emerging community of university patent administrators in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Once established, that community in turn allied itself with federal proponents of legislation in the late 1970s in a successful effort to pass BayhDole. Thus the passage of the Act can be seen not as creating modern technology transfer, but as institutionalizing an already-established university patenting community, itself partially a government creation

American Exceptionalism Revisited: Tax Relief, Poverty Reduction, and the Politics of Child Tax Credits

In the 1990s, several liberal welfare regimes (LWRs) introduced child tax credits (CTCs) aimed at reducing child poverty. While in other countries these tax credits were refundable, the United States alone introduced a nonrefundable CTC. As a result, the United States was the only country in which poor and working-class families were paradoxically excluded from these new benefits. A comparative analysis of Canada and the United States shows that American exceptionalism resulted from the cultural legacy of distinct public policies. We argue that policy changes in the 1940s institutionalized different "logics of appropriateness" that later constrained policymakers in the 1990s. Specifically, the introduction of family allowances in Canada and other LWR countries naturalized a logic of income supplementation in which families could legitimately receive cash benefits without the stigma of "welfare." Lacking this policy legacy, American attempts to introduce a refundable CTC were quickly derailed by policymakers who saw it as equivalent to welfare. Instead, they introduced a narrow, nonrefundable CTC under the alternative logic of "tax relief," even though this meant excluding the lowest-income families. The cultural legacy of past policies can explain American exceptionalism not only with regard to CTCs but to other social policies as well

Introduction

International audienc