Local Effects of Land Grant Colleges on Agricultural Innovation and Output

Abstract

To estimate the local effect of establishing land grant colleges, I compare locations that receive a land grant college to "runner-up" counties that were in contention to receive the land grant but did not for as-good-as-random reasons. I find that establishing a land grant college causes an increase in local innovation in college counties relative to the runner-up counties. In particular, locations that receive a land grant see increases in agricultural innovation as measured by both patents in agriculturerelated technology classes and the introduction of new wheat varieties. But land grant college counties see only small and imprecisely estimated improvements in agricultural performance, measured by yield and output, relative to runner-up counties. I discuss several alternative interpretations of these findings. By comparing the establishment of land grant colleges to the establishment of non-land grant colleges, I show that local invention, population, and agricultural output increase by less following the establishment of a land grant college relative to other types of colleges, but agricultural yields and new crop varieties increase by more. The effect of land grant colleges on local innovations is largest, even relative to non-land grant colleges, following the passage of legislation that increases funding to agricultural research. * I thank the NBER for financial support. I am very grateful to participants at the NBER conference "The Economics of Research and Innovation in Agriculture," especially to my discussant Bhaven Sampat, to Shawn Kantor and Alex Whalley for sharing data, and to Jeff Furman and Nicolas Ziebarth for thoughtful comments. All errors are my own.

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