Inventing the Endless Frontier: The Effects of the World War II Research Effort on Post-war Innovation

The Institute of Economics will hold a webinar meeting as part of its Seminar Series on Tuesday, March 16, 2021: Daniel P. Gross from Duke University will present the paper "Inventing the Endless Frontier: The Effects of the World War II Research Effort on Post-war Innovation".

Abstract:

During World War II, the U.S. government launched an unprecedented effort to mobilize science for war: the newly-established Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) entered thousands of R&D contracts with industrial and academic contractors, spending one to two orders of magnitude more than what the government was previously investing in science. In this paper, the authors study the long-run effects of the OSRD-supported research effort on U.S. invention. Using data on all OSRD contracts, they show that these investments had large effects on the direction and location of U.S. invention and high-tech industrial employment, setting in motion agglomeration forces which shaped the technology clusters of the postwar era. The results demonstrate the effects of a large, mission-driven government R&D program on the growth of domestic technology clusters and long-run technological progress.

The full paper is available here.

All interested participants are welcome to join online at the following link. External participants need to contact the organisers via email to grant access to the seminar.