During World War II, the U.S. government's Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) undertook one of the largest public investments in applied R&D in U.S. history, entering into thousands of contracts with firms and universities to...
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ZBW - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft, Standort Kiel
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During World War II, the U.S. government's Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) undertook one of the largest public investments in applied R&D in U.S. history, entering into thousands of contracts with firms and universities to perform research essential to the war effort. Using data on all OSRD-funded invention, we show that this shock had a formative impact on the U.S. innovation system, catalyzing technology clusters around the country with accompanying increases in high-tech entrepreneurship and employment. These effects continue growing to at least 1970 and appear to be attributable to agglomeration externalities, rather than sustained public R&D investment, which led to widening disparities in inventive output across the country. In the aggregate, wartime R&D permanently changed the trajectory of U.S. innovation in the direction of funded technologies, including electronics and communications
