Incentivos e criatividade: evidência da Acadêmica Ciências da Vida

Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences

Pierre Azoulay Joshua S. Gra Zivin Gustavo Manso

MIT and NBER UCSD and NBER MIT

Sloan School of Management IRPS Sloan School of Management

50 Memorial Drive, E52-555 9500 Gilman Drive 50 Memorial Drive, E52-446

Cambridge, MA 02142 La Jolla, CA 92093 Cambridge, MA 02142

December 7, 2009

Abstract

Despite its presumed role as an engine of economic growth, we know surprisingly little about the drivers of scienti c creativity. In this paper, we exploit key di erences across funding streams within the academic life sciences to estimate the impact of incentives on the rate and direction of scienti c exploration. Speci cally, we study the careers of investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which tolerates early failure, rewards long-term success, and gives its appointees great freedom to experiment; and grantees from the National Institute of Health, which are subject to short review cycles, pre-defi ned deliverables, and renewal policies unforgiving of failure. Using a combination of propensity-score weighting and di ference-in-di ferences estimation strategies, we nd that HHMI investigators produce high-impact papers at a much higher rate than two control groups of similarly-accomplished NIH-funded scientists. Moreover, the direction of their research changes in ways that suggest the program induces them to explore novel lines of inquiry.

Keywords: creativity, innovation, exploration, economics of science, incentives.

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