What's a PhD cost and what's it worth?

Matt Clancy: This week I wish I was reading “What’s a PhD cost and what’s it worth?” a new NBER working paper. The paper (would) trawl through the last few decades of NSF and NIH PhD training programs to identify quasi-random surges in funding for PhD students. It would use these to estimate both how much it costs to “create” a new PhD, and what the impact of a 10% increase in the PhD labor force is on the rate of innovation and economic growth. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, it would find the marginal impact on growth of funding a new PhD is [redacted] compared to funding original research. The paper would also find [redacted] programs tend to produce PhDs at the lowest cost, suggesting we might want to do more of them.