Are Ideas Really Getting Harder to Find?

Date

Time

4.00 - 6.00pm AEST

Venue

Melbourne University, Lower Theatre, FVAS (Ag) Building 142

Description

GUEST SPEAKER
Julian Alston
Distinguished Professor, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, University of California

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION

Julian Alston is an Australian American economist, currently a Distinguished Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Director of the Robert Mondavi Institute at University of California, Davis, and a published author. He is a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and Distinguished Fellow of Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society. 

Prior to beginning his current position in 1988, Julian was Chief Economist in the Department of Agriculture in Victoria, Australia, where he had been employed in various capacities since 1975. Julian’s experience in the public policy analysis and advice as well as the administration of a large scientific organisation has shaped his research interests. These interests include the economic analysis of agricultural markets and of public policies concerning agricultural incomes, prices, trade, and agricultural research and promotion. He is also director of the Robert Mondavi Institute’s Center for Wine Economics.

Julian was raised on the family farm in northern Victoria, Australia. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Science from the University of Melbourne in 1974; a Master’s degree in Agricultural Economics from La Trobe University in 1978; and a PhD in Economics from North Carolina State University in 1984.

Julian will present based on a paper in process titled “Are Ideas Really  Getting Harder to Find?” by Alston, Julian M. and Philip G. Pardey. 2022.  InSTePP Working Paper. St Paul, MN: International Science and Technology Practice and Policy Center, University of Minnesota, in process. Bloom et al. (2020) attribute the post-WWII slowdown in growth of U.S. TFP and other productivity measures to a decline in research productivity.  A weakness in their approach is that the authors measure research productivity as the annual growth rate of industrial or economywide productivity divided by the number of researchers, contemporaneously.  They give no consideration to the stock-flow relationships whereby current research effort gives rise to increments to a stock of depreciable knowledge and hence an evolving path of enhanced productivity over an extended but possibly finite future period.  

Using examples from agriculture, for which we have comparatively rich data resources, Julian will revisit established ideas and evidence on links between research spending and productivity. On both conceptual and empirical grounds, he questions whether the evidence supports the claim that a decline in productivity of researchers is responsible for the slowdown in productivity growth that has been observed in spite of large increases in numbers of scientists and in spending per scientist. The paper is motivated by a recent article in the AER:  Bloom, Nicholas, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb. 2020. “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” American Economic Review 110 (4): 1104–44.   

EVENT DETAILS

Date: Wednesday 20 April 2022
Time: 4.00pm – 6.00pm AEST
Venue: Lower Theatre, FVAS (Ag) Building 142 click here to view map
RSVP: by Monday 11 April 2022

For any queries or more information, please contact Paul Deane. 

Kind regards,
AARES VIC Branch