The subject is becoming more inventive and empirical, but questions about reproducibility and AI abound

How does decline in local neighbourhoods impact political discourse and competition?

Quantifying spillovers from scientific knowledge to technology is important for understanding the social returns to science and for designing policy. A key challenge is how to credit scientific work with the value generated in downstream technologies when ideas diffuse through chains of follow-on research. We propose a new measure - Science Rank - that uses the combined patent and paper citation network to assign a share of the private value of patented inventions to the scientific papers they directly or indirectly rely on. Validated against various types of scientific awards, the measure substantially outperforms direct patent-to-paper citation counts in identifying influential science. We document large heterogeneity in spillovers across countries, disciplines, and institutions. The US emerges from our analysis as a powerhouse of science spillovers, benefiting both domestic and foreign technology development. We apply our methodology to examine how different countries and individual institutions contribute to innovation that addresses global challenges such as climate change or more equal economic development. We find that a relatively large share of the total value generated by research in Lower and Middle Income Country (LMIC) feeds into climate change related innovation. We also highlight countries and institutions that are making particular contributions to LMIC innovation.

As economics scales, a key bottleneck is representing what papers claim in a comparable, aggregable form. We introduce evidence-annotated claim graphs that map each paper into a directed network of st...

Retail accounts for 5% of the UK economy – but its visibility gives it an outsize influence on public perception

Medical research remains concentrated in high-income settings, raising concerns about alignment with global health needs. Yet systematic evidence on how research responds to both disease burden and ac...