Events
Event

DEM Lunch Seminar with Dennis Verhoeven, SKEMA Business School (FR)

  • Location

    Weicker Building

    4, rue Alphonse Weicker

    2721, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

  • Topic(s)
    Economics & Management
  • Type(s)
    Free of charge, In-person event, Lectures and seminars

The Commercial Value of (Cut) Science

Abstract

The economic case for publicly funding science rests on the commercial value its discoveries create through invention, yet that value is known only in the aggregate. We measure it one publication at a time: we attribute the market value of patented inventions backward through a citation network of half a billion papers and patents, project each publication’s spillover forward to thirty years, and attach the result to the grants that paid for the research.

Per dollar of funding, NSF and NIH grants return many multiples of their public investment. Most of the value travels through indirect citation links rather than direct ones, and more than half is realized on inventions made abroad.

The commercial benefits of science arrive slowly: a research dollar breaks even only after about a decade. Applied to the grants terminated in 2025 by the US administration, every dollar saved in cut funding forgoes several dollars of future spillover value.

About the speaker

is Assistant Professor at the department of Knowledge, Technology and Organization (KTO) at SKEMA Business School (Universit茅 C么te d’Azur, GREDEG). He is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and a Research Fellow at KU Leuven.

His research is in the economics of innovation and science and asks how the resources devoted to discovery can be allocated better. Current projects study the returns to public science funding, industrial policy for innovation, the effect of air pollution on inventive productivity, knowledge diversity in inventor teams, and the gender productivity gap in science. Earlier work developed patent-based measures of technological novelty that can be used to identify radical inventions. His research has appeared in Research Policy, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and the International Journal of Industrial Organization. He holds a PhD in Applied Economics from KU Leuven. Before joining SKEMA he was a Research Officer at the London School of Economics, a post-doctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at KU Leuven, and a Marie Sk艂odowska-Curie Individual Fellow at Bocconi 8xav福利导航.

Language

English

This is a free seminar. Registration is mandatory.

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