We study the location-specific component in research productivity of economics and finance faculty who have ever been affiliated with the top 25 universities in the last three decades. We find that there was a positive effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970s; this effect weakened in the 1980s and disappeared in the 1990s. We decompose this university fixed effect and fi...

The commercialization of university research has become an increasingly important issue, given concerns regarding licensing and the university’s desire to maximize the returns to intellectual property (IP). In this paper, we assess the impact of university resources and routines/capabilities on the creation of spin-out companies. We find that both the number of spin-out companies created and th...

The paper argues that a substantial proportion of the wider economic benefits to society from publicly-funded basic research is associated with scientists’ migration into the commercial sector of the innovation system. Rejecting a reduction of the research process to the propositional knowledge it produces, a set of hypotheses on the value of different types of knowledge is derived. The hypothe...

A unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private nonprofits is the importance of mission, as opposed to profit, as an organizational goal. Such mission-oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission. This paper studies incentives in such contexts and emphasizes the role of matching the mission preference...

Charitable Bequests and Wealth at Death Charitable bequests are a major source of income for charities but surprisingly little is known about them. The aim of this paper is to propose a multi-stage framework for analysing the bequest decision and to examine the evidence for Great Britain provided by new data on estates. The novelty of the framework is that it distinguishes between the different...

The controversy over whether and how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests, in part, on whether higher prices can increase use. We test this hypothesis in a field experiment in Zambia using door-to-door marketing of a home water purification solution. Our methodology separates the screening effect of prices (charging more changes the mix of buyers) from the psychologi...

The targeted delivery of Ags to dendritic cell (DCs) in vivo greatly improves the efficiency of Ag presentation to T cells and allows an analysis of receptor function. To evaluate the function of Langerin/CD207, a receptor expressed by subsets of DCs that frequently coexpress the DEC205/CD205 receptor, we genetically introduced OVA into the C terminus of anti-receptor Ab H chains. Taking advant...

Previous research finds that individuals tend to donate more to charitable and non-profit organizations when their activities are publicly recognized. In this research, we find that public recognition may discourage individual giving in certain cases. We conducted a field experiment to investigate how public recognition influences individual charitable giving. We designed five schemes to recogn...

This article develops a new model of altruism called impact philanthropy. An impact philanthropist is someone who wants to personally ‘make a difference.’ While that motive is straightforward, its logical implications are significantly different from other models of philanthropy. For example, the contributions of other donors can reduce an impact philanthropist’s charitable fulfillment. As a re...