In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, several national governments have applied lockdown restrictions to reduce the infection rate. Here we perform a massive analysis on near–real-time Italian mobility data provided by Facebook to investigate how lockdown strategies affect economic conditions of individuals and local governments. We model the change in mobility as an exogenous shock similar to a natural disaster. We identify two ways through which mobility restrictions affect Italian citizens. First, we find that the impact of lockdown is stronger in municipalities with higher fiscal capacity. Second, we find evidence of a segregation effect, since mobility contraction is stronger in municipalities in which inequality is higher and for those where individuals have lower income per capita. Our results highlight both the social costs of lockdown and a challenge of unprecedented intensity: On the one hand, the crisis is inducing a sharp reduction of fiscal revenues for both national and local governments; on the other hand, a significant fiscal effort is needed to sustain the most fragile individuals and to mitigate the increase in poverty and inequality induced by the lockdown.

Advances in the understanding of the molecular basis of diseases have expanded the number of plausible therapeutic targets for the development of innovative agents in recent decades. However, although investment in pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) has increased substantially in this time, the lack of a corresponding increase in the output in terms of new drugs being approved indicates that therapeutic innovation has become more challenging. Here, using a large database that contains information on R&D projects for more than 28,000 compounds investigated since 1990, we examine the decline of R&D productivity in pharmaceuticals in the past two decades and its determinants. We show that this decline is associated with an increasing concentration of R&D investments in areas in which the risk of failure is high, which correspond to unmet therapeutic needs and unexploited biological mechanisms. We also investigate the potential variations in productivity with regard to the regional location of companies and find that although companies based in the United States and Europe differ in the composition of their R&D portfolios, there is no evidence of any productivity gap.

We draw on diverse data sets to compare the institutional organization of upstream life science research across the United States and Europe. Understanding cross-national differences in the organization of innovative labor in the life sciences requires attention to the structure and evolution of biomedical networks involving public research organizations (universities, government laboratories, nonprofit research institutes, and research hospitals), science-based biotechnology firms, and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. We use network visualization methods and correspondence analyses to demonstrate that innovative research in biomedicine has its origins in regional clusters in the United States and in European nations. But the scientific and organizational composition of these regions varies in consequential ways. In the United States, public research organizations and small firms conduct R&D across multiple therapeutic areas and stages of the development process. Ties within and across these regions link small firms and diverse public institutions, contributing to the development of a robust national network. In contrast, the European story is one of regional specialization with a less diverse group of public research organizations working in a smaller number of therapeutic areas. European institutes develop local connections to small firms working on similar scientific problems, while cross-national linkages of European regional clusters typically involve large pharmaceutical corporations. We show that the roles of large and small firms differ in the United States and Europe, arguing that the greater heterogeneity of the U.S. system is based on much closer integration of basic science and clinical development.

Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and career growth of an individual remains poorly understood, despite recent proliferation of quantitative research evaluation methods. Here, we develop an original framework for measuring how a publication's citation rate Δc depends on the reputation of its central author i, in addition to its net citation count c. To estimate the strength of the reputation effect, we perform a longitudinal analysis on the careers of 450 highly cited scientists, using the total citations C i of each scientist as his/her reputation measure. We find a citation crossover c × , which distinguishes the strength of the reputation effect. For publications with c < c × , the author's reputation is found to dominate the annual citation rate. Hence, a new publication may gain a significant early advantage corresponding to roughly a 66% increase in the citation rate for each tenfold increase in C i . However, the reputation effect becomes negligible for highly cited publications meaning that, for c ≥ c × , the citation rate measures scientific impact more transparently. In addition, we have developed a stochastic reputation model, which is found to reproduce numerous statistical observations for real careers, thus providing insight into the microscopic mechanisms underlying cumulative advantage in science.computational sociology | science of science | networks of networks | Matthew effect | sociophysics C itation counts are widely used to judge the impact of both scientists and their publications (1-4). Although it is recognized that many factors outside the pure merit of the research or the authors influence such counts, little effort has been devoted to identifying and quantifying the role of the author-specific factors. Recent investigations have begun to study the impact the individual scientists have through collaboration and reputation spillovers (5, 6), two integrative features of scientific careers that contribute to cumulative advantage (7-9). However, the majority of citation models avoid author-specific effects, mainly due to the difficulty in acquiring comprehensive disambiguated career data (10-13). As the measures are becoming increasingly common in evaluation scenarios throughout science, it is crucial to better understand what the citation measures actually represent in the context of scientists' careers. Moreover, how does reputation affect a scientist's access to key resources, the incentives to publish quality over quantity, and other key decisions along the career path (14-18)? In addition, what role does reputation play in the mentor-matching process within academic institutions, in the effectiveness of single/double blinding in peer review, and in the reward system of science (14,15,19)?It is against this background that we have developed a quantitative framework with the goal of isola...