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In the run-up to the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, General
Dwight D. Eisenhower faced a series of seemingly insurmountable
dilemmas. Outnumbered and desperate for any advantage to make their
way past the well-defended beaches and into France, the Allies had
reached out to French guerillas and partisans to help secure their
aims-but transforming the highly independent resistance groups into
a governable body and fighting force was a formidable task. To make
matters more difficult, President Roosevelt refused to give full
Allied support to Charles de Gaulle and his Free French government,
and would not supply the timing, location, and other key details of
Operation Overlord. It was into this storm of political mistrust
and military confusion that Eisenhower sent the Jedburghs.
Eisenhower's Guerillas tells the story of the reconnaissance and
intelligence teams of young Special Forces, called Jedburghs, who
worked behind enemy lines to strengthen the Allies' position in
Northern France. Their task of organizing and training the French
operatives, already monumental, was made more difficult by the fact
that France's war aims were profoundly different from those of
America and Britain, who regarded France as merely a military
objective on the way to defeating Germany. Ben Jones describes how
Eisenhower learned how to exploit this political turmoil to his
advantage, and explores how the Allied Jedburgh teams still managed
to coordinate French guerrilla operations within the overall plans
for the country's liberation. Underscoring the critical and often
overlooked part that irregular warfare played in Allied operations
on the Continent, Jones delivers a riveting story of the battle for
France and the political complexities that threatened to undermine
the operation from within.
Rigorous nonpartisan research on the effects of economic forces and
public policy on entrepreneurship and innovation. Entrepreneurship
and innovation are widely recognized as drivers of economic
dynamics and long-term prosperity. This series communicates key
findings about the implications of entrepreneurial and innovative
activity across the economy. In the first paper, Joseph Barberio,
Jacob Becraft, Zied Ben Chaouch, Dimitris Bertsimas, Tasuku Kitada,
Michael Li, Andrew Lo, Kevin Shi, and Qingyang Xu explore
pharmaceutical firms’ weak incentives to develop vaccines against
prospective diseases—due to high investment risks, low expected
returns, and the rarity of pandemics— and consider a portfolio
approach to financing vaccine research. Next, Daniel Hemel and Lisa
Larrimore Ouellette describe a “trilemma” between quality,
price, and access that appears after a generic pharmaceuticals
patent expires, and show that it is difficult in a regulatory
context to achieve distinct goals around price, access, and quality
simultaneously. In the third paper, Silvia Dalla Fontana and Ramana
Nanda examine the role of patents in the transition to a
carbon-free world. They find relative to other technological areas,
“Net Zero patents” are close to the scientific frontier, but
due to difficulties of commercializing inventions, the share of
such patents that are venture-backed has been increasingly directed
to areas outside clean tech and other “deep” technologies.
Jacquelyn Pless examines the effects of divestment from firms in
“dirty” industries on innovation to combat climate change, or
“green innovation.” She finds that compared with divesting,
investing in firms and engaging with green corporate governance
practices may induce more green innovation. Next, Robert Fairlie
and David Robinson find that Black-owned innovative-intensive new
businesses start smaller than their peers and do not converge in
size over time. Differential access to bank financing is a major
factor. Also “soft information,” which can help new businesses
without established track records, can increase barriers for black
founders and limit entrepreneurial pathways to prosperity. Finally,
Jonathan Gruber, Simon Johnson, and Enrico Moretti consider the
regional concentration of innovative activity in the United States.
They find that while the concentration of activity has net
advantages today, understanding the long-term benefits of more
diffuse innovation clusters —including equity, industrial
diversification, and talent development—is important.
Using the latest empirical and conceptual research for readers in
economics, business, and policy, this volume surveys the key
components of innovation policy and the social returns to
innovation investment. In advanced economies like the United
States, innovation has long been recognized as a central force for
increasing economic prosperity and human welfare. Today, the US
government promotes innovation through various mechanisms,
including tax credits for private-sector research, grant support
for basic and applied research, and institutions like the Small
Business Innovation Research Program of the National Science
Foundation. Drawing on the latest empirical and conceptual
research, Innovation and Public Policy surveys the key components
of innovation policy and the social returns to innovation
investment. It examines mechanisms that can advance the pace of
invention and innovative activity, including expanding the research
workforce through schooling and immigration policy and funding
basic research. It also considers scientific grant systems for
funding basic research, including those at institutions like the
National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation,
and investigates the role of entrepreneurship policy and of other
institutions that promote an environment conducive to scientific
breakthroughs.
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