What’s new in the economics of innovation
This week I’m at the NBER Summer Institute, taking in lots of new work on the economics of science and innovation. Two of the papers being presented have already made appearances on this blog (one on idea diffusion, and one on the impact of AlphaFold). The rest of the agenda is also worth a look. Chen, Liu, & Ma take a new approach to estimating the economic value of science, building a text-based innovation network from 463 million papers and 81 million patents to trace how knowledge flows into technology; Songyuan Teng decomposes pharmaceutical innovation into novelty (new chemical building blocks) and recombination (new assemblies of existing blocks) and models their relative importance; and Mohnen & Gans have a new study on AlphaFold showing that it sped up experimental research but narrowed its scope (echoing other findings on contraction in AI-driven science).
- https://www.nber.org/conferences/si-2026-innovation
- https://www.abundanceandgrowth.org/p/the-slowdown-in-idea-diffusion
- https://www.abundanceandgrowth.org/p/what-were-reading-march-20-2026
- https://www.songma.org/files/chenliuma_valueofscience.pdf
- https://songyuan-teng.github.io/files/JMP.pdf
- https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f244488.pdf
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09922-y