Fiona Murray - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Fiona Murray

SSRN Electronic Journal

NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-r... more NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015

Immigration is rapidly changing the composition of the R&D workforce in the United States, with i... more Immigration is rapidly changing the composition of the R&D workforce in the United States, with important implications for both management and public policy. We study here the Chinese chemists and chemical engineers who migrate to the United States for their graduate studies. We analyze productivity at the individual researcher level, thus bypassing the identification issues that earlier studies had to confront when analyzing the relationship between immigration and innovation at the university or firm level. Using new data and measurement techniques, we find robust evidence that Chinese students make disproportionate contributions to the scientific output of their advisors and departments. We attribute this result to a selection effect as it is relatively more difficult for Chinese students to gain admission into U.S. PhD programs. Our results strengthen the case for liberal student migration policies.

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California ... more eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2020

Why are women underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, and innovation? Using a samp... more Why are women underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, and innovation? Using a sample of Gates and NIH grant applications submitted by a common pool of US-based academic researchers, we implement a range of text analysis methods associated with gendered language. We find that despite significant institutional differences, there are consistent gender differences in scientific communication. By contrast, we find starkly differing impacts of these text characteristics on funding outcomes across our institutional settings. Our findings suggest that institutional reform is likely to be a viable strategy for increasing gender inclusion in science and technology.

, seminar participants at MIT and NBER, and conference attendees at the Academy of Management, th... more , seminar participants at MIT and NBER, and conference attendees at the Academy of Management, the American Economic Association, and the REER conference for their helpful comments and suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Foundations and Trends® in Entrepreneurship, 2019

Organization Science, 2007

China is increasingly seen as a participant in the global knowledge economy, with recent studies ... more China is increasingly seen as a participant in the global knowledge economy, with recent studies have highlighted the rising number of scientists and engineers educated in Chinese institutions of higher education, and the growing funding allocated to the production of knowledge. Question remains as to whether China is producing scientific knowledge at the global frontier, and whether the production of scientific research in China is globally competitive. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Chinese policymakers have distinguished scientific modernization as essential to long-term economic prosperity and endogenous growth, and, more recently, to addressing the modern socioeconomic and environmental challenges confronting China. The State Council, largely through the Ministry of Science and Technology and Ministry of Education, have invested heavily in universities and research institutes to promote the development of worldclass research. To evaluate the state of scientific innovation in China, three bibliometric analyses are conducted. First, United States patents with full or partial Chinese ownership are used to provide a measure of high-impact industrial and applied innovation. Second, all SCI-indexed articles affiliated with at least one Chinese institution are evaluated. Finally, articles published in the journal Nature and subject-specific Nature journals are used as a proxy for high-impact scientific research. The results suggest that while the majority of Chinese scientific research is of low impact, that frontier research is becoming increasingly common in a growing number of Chinese institutions. There is evidence of a learning effect, suggesting that China engages in international consortia to participate in frontier research and uses the resulting experience to independently produce frontier knowledge, particularly in the fields of genetics and nanotechnology.

New England Journal of Medicine, 2007

Philanthropic investment can close the funding gap between science research and the commercializa... more Philanthropic investment can close the funding gap between science research and the commercialization of science-based products.

We thank Jeff Furman, both for extremely insightful comments and suggestions as well as for gener... more We thank Jeff Furman, both for extremely insightful comments and suggestions as well as for generous assistance in obtaining the citation data. We also thank Philippe Aghion, Tim Bresnahan, Iain

This paper examines the inventor gender gap in the United States. While prior work has explored t... more This paper examines the inventor gender gap in the United States. While prior work has explored the role of location on innovation, little is known about the role of location on female inventor activity. The low presence of women who patent (i.e., ?female inventors?) has been documented across countries. However, prior studies abstract from variation across sub-national regions and their industry clusters. To explain the inventor gender gap, we need to better understand the potential differences in the regional context where female inventors (FI) and male inventors (MI) operate. The goal of this paper is to examine: Where are female inventors located? How do female versus male inventors source knowledge inside their organizations and in the external environment? We test the hypothesis that women are geographically constrained, and so, female inventors will be more likely to source knowledge that is closer by. To examine these questions we use novel data that maps the participation o...

To what extent does “false science” impact the rate and direction of scientific change? We examin... more To what extent does “false science” impact the rate and direction of scientific change? We examine the impact of more than 1,100 scientific retractions on the citation trajectories of articles that are close neighbors of retracted articles in intellectual space but were published prior to the retraction event. Our results indicate that following retraction and relative to carefully selected controls, related articles experience a lasting five to ten percent decline in the rate at which they are cited. We probe the mechanisms that might underlie these negative spillovers over intellectual space. One view holds that adjacent fields atrophy post-retraction because the shoulders they offer to follow-on researchers have been proven to be shaky or absent. An alternative view holds that scientists avoid the “infected” fields lest their own status suffers through mere association. Two pieces of evidence are consistent with the latter view. First, for-profit citers are much less responsive t...

Science, 2021

Women are more likely than men to invent for women, but obstacles limit their participation in th... more Women are more likely than men to invent for women, but obstacles limit their participation in the innovation system

PloS one, 2017

Academic research is increasingly cross-disciplinary and collaborative, between and within instit... more Academic research is increasingly cross-disciplinary and collaborative, between and within institutions. In this context, what is the role and relevance of an individual's spatial position on a campus? We examine the collaboration patterns of faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through their academic output (papers and patents), and their organizational structures (institutional affiliation and spatial configuration) over a 10-year time span. An initial comparison of output types reveals: 1. diverging trends in the composition of collaborative teams over time (size, faculty versus non-faculty, etc.); and 2. substantively different patterns of cross-building and cross-disciplinary collaboration. We then construct a multi-layered network of authors, and find two significant features of collaboration on campus: 1. a network topology and community structure that reveals spatial versus institutional collaboration bias; and 2. a persistent relationship between proxim...

Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2014

Although the validity of knowledge is critical to scientific progress, substantial concerns exist... more Although the validity of knowledge is critical to scientific progress, substantial concerns exist regarding the governance of knowledge production. While as or more important to the knowledge economy as defects are in the manufacturing economy, mechanisms to identify and signal "defective" or false knowledge are poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate one such institution-the system of scientific retractions. By analyzing the universe of peer-reviewed scientific articles retracted from the biomedical literature between 1972-2006 and comparing with a matched control sample, we identify the correlates, timing, and causal impact of scientific retractions, thus providing insight into the workings of a distributed, peer-based system for the governance of validity in scientific knowledge. Our findings suggest that attention is a key predictor of retraction-retracted articles arise most frequently among highly-cited articles. The retraction system is expeditious in uncovering knowledge that is ever determined to be false (the mean time to retraction is less than two years) and democratic (retraction is not systematically affected by author prominence). Lastly, retraction causes an immediate, severe, and long-lived decline in future citations. Conditional on the obvious limitation that we cannot measure the absolute amount of false science in circulation, these results support the view that distributed governance systems can be designed to relatively swiftly to uncover false knowledge and to mitigate the costs that false knowledge for future generations of producers.