Elizabeth Popp Berman's Research Projects

Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine

• This research asks how and why academic science became more tied to the marketplace after the late 1970s. It looks at the emergence of market-oriented practices in universities, including the patenting of faculty inventions, biotech entrepreneurship by faculty, and the creation of university-industry research centers. It argues that government action, motivated by new ideas about the impact of scientific and technological innovation on economic growth, transformed universities’ resource environment in ways that allowed such practices to thrive.

How Policymakers Use Economic Ideas: Three Policy Debates

• This project looks at how policymakers adopt and transform economic ideas in the course of political action. Currently, we are looking at how this process occurs in the domain of tax policy. In the future, the research will be extended to examine science and technology policy and antitrust policy, both of which have been significantly shaped by developments in economic theory.