Climbing atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research
利用生物资源中心这一特定制度，通过双重差分法评估其对累积性研究的影响，发现有效制度能放大科学发现的累积效应，对理解知识生产与制度设计有参考价值。
While cumulative knowledge production is central to growth, little empirical research investigates how institutions shape whether existing knowledge can be exploited to create new knowledge. This paper assesses the impact of a specific institution, a biological resource center, whose objective is to certify and disseminate knowledge. We disentangle the marginal impact of this institution on cumulative research from the impact of selection, in which the most important discoveries are endogenously linked to research-enhancing institutions. Exploiting exogenous shifts of biomaterials across institutional settings and employing a difference-in-differences approach, we find that effective institutions amplify the cumulative impact of individual scientific discoveries.