Essays on economics of innovation and knowledge production

As articulated in economic growth theory, the accumulation of knowledge and human capital in higher education can be the essential sources of long-term economic growth. This PhD thesis carried out the following three empirical analyses on factors affecting these knowledge production and human capital accumulation. Focusing on the role carried out by universities in knowledge and human capital growth, Chapter 1 empirically analyzed the effects that university governance have on research activities by university researchers. Chapter 2 empirically analyzed the effects that post-graduate education has on human capital accumulation in research activities by PhD student. These analyses were treated as accumulations in intellectual human capital and mechanisms for cultivation. Moreover, Chapter 3 analyzed the effect of public and government research and development investment strongly linked to academic-industrial collaboration on businesses producing patents. Chapter 1 estimates the causal effects of university governance on their research activity through the analysis of the transformation of Japanese national universities into “national university corporation”, a juridical 0public body separated from central government. The Corporatization (or Partial Privatization) of the Japanese national universities since 2004 is characterized as exogenous source of promoting additive competitive environments within national universities, improving accountability, and expanding a range of some aspects of autonomous function of national universities. Some detailed estimation results were attained through DID estimations using private universities as the control group that had not affected by the corporatization of national universities bringing about a significantly positive impact for engineering and economics publication activity in national universities. Moreover, analyses of these fields of study that divided universities into less research-intensive universities and more research-intensive universities found that the more research-intensive universities had significantly robust positive effects, whereas significant effects couldn't be seen in the less research-intensive universities. The analyses largely indicated that the transformation into independent institutions resulted in the advancement of domestic competition and resources being concentrated on universities with superior research capabilities in line with the drastic decrease in subsidies for operations. Furthermore, the analyses suggest that the effect coincided with intensified efforts to acquire competitive-type research funding also induced by the reform. These results suggests the possibility that competitive research resources (perhaps more efficiently) have become concentrated towards universities that are achieving superior research results, and indicates a positive effect for research-intensive universities and no significant effect for less research-intensive universities. However, research output in medical science by national universities has shown a pronounced decrease. This result is consistent with the expectation that corporatization, which encourages income-generating activity, results in a decrease in the research output of university hospitals. This finding reflects the special characteristics of university hospitals that render them the main producers of research output and the greatest national university revenue earners from the provision of clinical services. The objective of Chapter 2, co-authored with Ryo Nakajima (Keio University), is to quantitatively elucidate the effectiveness of research guidance given by supervisors to student advisees, value-added, by focusing on post-graduate education as the provider of innovation in cultivating human capital. Here, a problem arises where the matching of the supervisor and student pair is endogenously determined making it difficult to deal with the resulting self-selection effect. Therefore, this research analyzed issues with matching by expanding on the value-added model technique used by Rivkin, Hanusheck and Kain (2005), and constructing data on supervisor and student pairs that exogenously broke down as a result of supervisor turnover during guidance based on data on supervisors and students from the Department of Physics at the University of Tokyo. We find that a one-standard-deviation increase in professor quality results in a 0.54 standard deviation increase in a doctoral student’s research achievement growth, increasing the number of first-authored papers that are published in top journals by 0.64 at the doctoral level. The purpose of Chapter 3, co-authored with Taro Akiyama (Yokohama National University), Tatsumi Ishizuka (Yokohama National University) and Ryuichi Tamura (Hitotsubashi University), is to analyze the influence of the Japanese government R&D investment on private sector patenting in the field of fuel cell. Specifically, using the data set on fuel cell-related patents between 1999 and 2011, we analyzed the patent productivity of companies following a partnership with NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization.) The results of the estimation showed that, when analyzing without using the panel data structure, there was a significant positive influence on the number of patent applications, however, it was also revealed that there was no significant positive influence on the quality indexes such as the number of times those patents were cited. Furthermore, when analyzing while taking advantage of the characteristics of panel data, no significant influence was found in either of the two cases