What's New Under the Sun

Announcements: Funding for research on the returns to public investment in R&D is available from a coalition of funders. Applications due April 30. See the full call here. This is part of the Pop Up Journal project that is a collaboration between the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving. The post below was originally published by me on the Abundance and Growth blog, where I write with the rest of the team at the Abundance and Growth Fund.

In this special annual edition of What’s New Under the Sun, we have a big bundle of the titles, abstracts, and links to innovation-related PhD job market papers from 2025. Some were sent my way following my request in the last newsletter, but to find the majority of these, I manually looked at the titles of ~1,300 job market papers. Even so, I’m sure I missed some great papers. If that’s you, email me and I’ll add you to the posts. I’ve split this post into two to make it a bit easier to navigate.

Announcements: The Institute for Progress is hosting the third iteration of its free online PhD short-course: The Economics of Ideas, Science, and Innovation. If you’ve completed the equivalent of a first year economics PhD, apply by January 9. I’m giving the lecture on the returns to R&D! I have a new blog! It’s a group blog by the team at The Abundance and Growth Fund (where I’m the program director).

Hi everyone, Still no new post, but a few quick updates. First, I have new research paper out in Science called “What if the NIH had been 40% smaller?”, coauthored with the great Pierre Azoulay, Danielle Li, and Bhaven Sampat. Here’s an abstract: Calls to reduce the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by 40% have surfaced amid broader federal spending debates.

Hi Everyone, In March, I became the (first interim, later permanent) head of Open Philanthropy’s Abundance and Growth Fund, a new $120+ million program to accelerate economic growth and reduce the cost of living. Now we’re looking to hire 2-4 people to join me and Jordan Dworkin (who joined last year to work on innovation policy), to do strategic grantmaking and research across a wide range of areas.

New Things Under the Sun is a living literature review; when the literature changes, so do we! This post covers a few updates to articles. As a reminder, the most up-to-date versions of each article live on NewThingsUnderTheSun.com. The post Government Funding for R&D and Productivity Growth reviewed a few recent papers that try to empirically measure the productivity impact of government spending on R&D.

Announcements: Innovation Growth Lab is hiring for multiple roles. Applications are due May 1. Learn more here. The Institute for Progress is hiring a Fellow / Senior Fellow to work on Metascience. Applications are due May 11. More information here. On to the post! This post was jointly written by me and Caroline Fry, assistant professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. This article will be updated as the state of the academic literature evolves; you can read the latest version here.

New Things Under the Sun is a living literature review; when the literature changes, so do we! This post covers a few updates to articles. As a reminder, the most up-to-date versions of each article live on NewThingsUnderTheSun.com. But before we get into that, some announcements. Most importantly, my job is (temporarily) changing in ways that affect New Things Under the Sun.

This article will be updated as the state of the academic literature evolves; you can read the latest version here. How much does the US federal government spend on R&D? What kind of R&D does the government fund? What’s a reasonable guess at the average return on investment (ROI) of R&D? Has the average ROI of R&D spending changed over time? What’s a reasonable guess at the marginal, rather than average, ROI of government R&D? Is government support for R&D self-financing?

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