Learning from the United States' experience: Private equity and financing healthcare in Canada.

Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare has grown substantially in recent years, raising alarm about its impact on patient care, healthcare professionals, and the overall integrity of the healthcare system. The influx of PE investments into healthcare has sparked debates regarding profit-driven motives, cost-cutting measures, and potential risks to patient safety and access to essential services. This article examines the extent and possible impacts of private equity in Canadian healthcare using data from a proprietary database. Drawing upon evidence from academic studies in the United States, this paper provides evidence on the adverse impacts on the quality of care, the deterioration in working conditions, and degradation of the healthcare system. It provides suggestions to limit the predatory impacts of PE investment.

Toward understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on labor.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies have the potential to significantly disrupt labor markets. While AI and automation can augment the productivity of some workers, they can replace the work done by others and will likely transform almost all occupations at least to some degree. Rising automation is happening in a period of growing economic inequality, raising fears of mass technological unemployment and a renewed call for policy efforts to address the consequences of technological change. In this paper we discuss the barriers that inhibit scientists from measuring the effects of AI and automation on the future of work. These barriers include the lack of high-quality data about the nature of work (e.g., the dynamic requirements of occupations), lack of empirically informed models of key microlevel processes (e.g., skill substitution and human-machine complementarity), and insufficient understanding of how cognitive technologies interact with broader economic dynamics and institutional mechanisms (e.g., urban migration and international trade policy). Overcoming these barriers requires improvements in the longitudinal and spatial resolution of data, as well as refinements to data on workplace skills. These improvements will enable multidisciplinary research to quantitatively monitor and predict the complex evolution of work in tandem with technological progress. Finally, given the fundamental uncertainty in predicting technological change, we recommend developing a decision framework that focuses on resilience to unexpected scenarios in addition to general equilibrium behavior.

Academic Teams and Commercialization in the Life Sciences.

We review the literature on entrepreneurial team formation with a focus on data to study academic teams and summarize our empirical work on the life sciences industry. We consider how academics form teams to start new companies and the implications of various configurations on firm behavior with regards to patenting, survival and firm growth. We present several empirical challenges facing research on academic teams and conclude with suggestions for future research.

The Domino Effects of Federal Research Funding.

The extent to which federal investment in research crowds out or decreases incentives for investment from other funding sources remains an open question. Scholarship on research funding has focused on the relationship between federal and industry or, more comprehensively, non-federal funding without disentangling the other sources of research support that include nonprofit organizations and state and local governments. This paper extends our understanding of academic research support by considering the relationships between federal and non-federal funding sources provided by the National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development Survey. We examine whether federal research investment serves as a complement or substitute for state and local government, nonprofit, and industry research investment using the population of research-active academic science fields at U.S. doctoral granting institutions. We use a system of two equations that instruments with prior levels of both federal and non-federal funding sources and accounts for time-invariant academic institution-field effects through first differencing. We estimate that a 1% increase in federal research funding is associated with a 0.411% increase in nonprofit research funding, a 0.217% increase in state and local research funding, and a 0.468% increase in industry research funding, respectively. Results indicate that federal funding plays a fundamental role in inducing complementary investments from other funding sources, with impacts varying across academic division, research capacity, and institutional control.

U.S. research universities' institutional conflict of interest policies.

RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES RECEIVE INCREASING amounts of income from intellectual property, which makes institutional conflict of interest (ICOI) policies increasingly important. We analyzed the content and scope of ICOI policies at 60 research universities in the U.S. Association of American Universities. In particular, we focused on the following categories: disclosure, review, management, and prohibited or constrained activities. Most of the plans were relatively unelaborated, but 8 were elaborated "university as firm" policies that addressed the way officers and managers acting as agents for the university handled commercial activity through an array of management tools. However, even elaborated current ICOI policies may not be sufficient to manage ICOI because this type of commercial activity is not routine for universities in that faculty discovery or creation of intellectual property is not predictable. Thus, nearly all ICOI is managed on a case-by-case basis by various committees or senior institutional officials. As a result, institutional policy is only as strong as these committees and officers and the management plans they develop and monitor to handle conflicts.