Matt Clancy

Patent citations: Tracing spillovers or chasing shadows? Measuring how ideas move across firms and regions

🔎 Patent citations are everywhere in innovation research. But do they really trace how ideas spill over between inventors—or are we mistaking legal paperwork for knowledge flows? 🧐

New on #ThePatentist: www.thepatentist.com/p/patent-cit...

#patents #innovation #spillovers

Excellent retrospective approach to a timely prospective question.

Thanks Brian!

What if NIH had been 40% smaller? Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

You can read the full paper here. It’s short and I think pretty transparent!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We find that drugs that cite at-risk research are, on average, no less likely to get priority reviews at FDA and do not have worse implied valuations by the stock market. In short, we don’t have reason to believe drugs linked to at-risk research are worse.

Are drugs linked to at-risk research worse? We look at two proxies for drug value: whether a drug gets priority review at the FDA, and stock market reactions when a drug patent is announced. Yes, very imperfect, but we think still worth looking at.

Finally, it’s less common, but in some cases, drugs directly acknowledge support from specific NIH grants in their patents. Only 40 drugs acknowledge NIH grant support, but of that group, 14 (35%) acknowledge support from a grant that is at-risk.

We consider other ways to link drugs with at-risk grants. For example, we find that 12% of drugs have more than a quarter of their patent-to-paper citations going to at-risk research. See the paper for some examples of specific drugs.

This doesn’t mean 51% of drugs wouldn’t exist if the NIH had been 40% smaller. Various caveats cut in different ways (see discussion in the online appendix). But we take this as evidence that the benefits of at-risk NIH research are wide and diffuse.

Most new drugs are protected by patents. We look at these patents to see if they cite research funded by at-risk grants. We find 51% of drugs have a patent that cites one or more articles funded by an at-risk grant.

Would anyone miss the research funded by these at-risk grants? To help assess that, we link these at-risk grants to drugs, focusing on all 557 FDA approvals for new molecular entities approved in the 21st century.

We have the real priority scores for all NIH grants made over 1980-2007. Since NIH mostly funds research by working down these priority scores until the budget runs out, we can identify the grants that would probably have been cut with a smaller budget.

New research by Pierre Azoulay, Danielle Li, Bhaven Sampat and me.

Earlier this year, the President’s budget proposed a 40% cut to the budget of the NIH. This motivated us to ask: what if the NIH had been 40% smaller?

If you're a thinker or do-er in the housing space and you haven't subscribed to @michaelwiebe.bsky.social's substack, you're doing it wrong!

It's a living urban econ lit review, inspired by @mattsclancy.bsky.social's New Things Under the Sun.

Great stuff! Here's an example ⤵️.

Nice article on returns to R&D in MIT Tech Review, ft. our own @mattsclancy.bsky.social
www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/17/...

Deadline to apply to these positions is today! Big opportunity to accelerate growth and progress in housing, energy, clinical trials, and more.

City Talks: Remote working and the future of cities - Centre for Cities Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Matt Clancy, Senior Programme Officer at Open Philanthropy and the creator of New Things Under the Sun, a

PODCAST | Remote working and the future of cities 🎙️

@andrewcities.bsky.social is joined by @mattsclancy.bsky.social to discuss hybrid working, productivity, cities and the future of work.

Listen to the pod 🎧👇

External Referrals - Open Philanthropy External Referrals

Apply by July 27 for full consideration! Know someone who might be a good fit? Earn $5k if your referral results in a hire: shorturl.at/S3N8j (4/4)

Senior Program Associate/Program Officer, Abundance and Growth (Specialist Track) Open Philanthropy is looking to hire up to four new team members to join our Abundance and Growth https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/abundance-and-growth/#:~:text=This%20fund%20supports%20efforts%...

There are two kinds of position posted, which we’re calling specialists (who will focus on 1-2 of the above areas) and generalists (who will have a broader portfolio). Full job descriptions below. (3/4)
Specialist: shorturl.at/yF9Hq
Generalist: shorturl.at/aWGnm

We’re interested in putting together a team with expertise across many different possible areas: housing policy, energy, infrastructure, state capacity, healthcare and clinical trials, economic dynamism, and more. (2/4)

Announcing Our New $120M Abundance And Growth Fund | Open Philanthropy We are excited to announce the launch of our new Abundance and Growth Fund, which will spend at least $120 million over the next three years to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific and tech...

The Abundance and Growth Fund at Open Philanthropy is hiring! We’re looking for 2-4 people to help expand this new $120+ million program to accelerate economic growth and reduce the cost of living through strategic grantmaking and research. (1/4) www.openphilanthropy.org/research/ann...

Este es el futuro.

Enter the 1st pop‑up journal, true living R&D ROI lab for Zvi Griliches: revisiting his seminal question, catalyzing his legacy in real‑time policy, and promising impact no posthumous Econ Nobel (which he more than deserved!) ever could. Arguably the wisest academic publishing initiative in decades.

Such a clever idea. You could imagine its application to all sorts of wicked problems…

This is a really cool kind of initiative: a pop-up journal on the returns to public R&D: popupjournal.com. Pop-up journals to coordinate research on questions that matter!

Interesting initiative!

Love this - need more innovation in academic publishing

Very excited to join with Open Philanthropy on an all-out sprint to answer some of the thorniest practical questions in economics. First question: What return do we get when we invest in R&D?

Good luck with this! An interesting innovation in the organization of the study of innovation.

interesting idea. we need more innovation in the research publication/curation space.