{"doi":"10.3386/w33780","title":"The Social Returns to Public R&D","abstract":"Recent empirical evidence by Fieldhouse and Mertens (2024) points to a strong causal link between federal nondefense R&D funding and private-sector productivity growth, and large implied social returns to public R&D investment.We show that these high social return estimates broadly align with existing evidence on the social returns to private or total R&D spending.If the R&D increases authorized under the CHIPS and Science Act were fully appropriated, our modeling indicates a boost in U.S. productivity within a few years, reaching gains of 0.2-0.4% after seven years or more.At their peak, the direct productivity effects of the implied expansion in nondefense R&D alone would raise output by over $40 billion in a single year-exceeding total outlays from the CHIPS Act R&D provisions over a decade.The potential productivity impact of fiscal consolidations changing R&D spending is not clear ex ante.We show that in recent fiscal consolidations, cuts to federal R&D funding were largely borne by defense R&D, whereas funding for nondefense R&D was largely spared or was increased.Our evidence suggests that future deficit reduction efforts that instead emphasize cuts to nondefense R&D funding could have a larger adverse impact on productivity and economic growth than previous fiscal consolidations.","journal":"National Bureau of Economic Research","year":2025,"id":558142,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9468,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1459026,"name":"Karel Mertens","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1458603,"name":"Andrew J. Fieldhouse","orcid":"0000-0002-3548-1153","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":19,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:55:25.969263Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}