Abstract
Despite its presumed role as an engine of economic growth, we know surprisingly little about the drivers of scientic creativity. In this paper, we exploit key di erences across funding streams within the academic life sciences to estimate the impact of incentives on the rate and direction of scientic exploration. Specically, we study the careers of investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which tolerates early failure, rewards longterm success, and gives its appointees great freedom to experiment; and grantees from the National Institute of Health, which are subject to short review cycles, pre-dened deliverables, and renewal policies unforgiving of failure. Using a combination of propensity-score weighting and di erence-in-di erences estimation strategies, we nd that HHMI investigators produce high-impact papers at a much higher rate than two control groups of similarly-accomplished NIH-funded scientists. Moreover, the direction of their research changes in ways that suggest the program induces them to explore novel lines of inquiry.
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