Bhaven N. Sampat

Bhaven Sampat is an economist at Johns Hopkins University, with faculty appointments at the new School of Government and Policy and the Carey Business School. He is also a Research Associate in the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

His research focuses on the economics and political economy of innovation and innovation policy. Among other topics, he has studied U.S. and global life science patent policy, the politics and economics of publicly funded science, the roles of government in pharmaceutical innovation, and the economic history of the U.S. biomedical research enterprise. An overarching theme in his research is how science and technology policies can best be designed to contribute to improvements in health and other socio-economic outcomes.

Sampat received his B.A., M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. (all in Economics) from Columbia University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Research program at the University of Michigan. Before joining Hopkins, he was a Professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs and School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and prior to that served as Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor at the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He has held visiting positions at NYU Law School and NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, among other institutions.

He is a founding member of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Innovation Information Initiative (I3), a data collaborative for open innovation data and related analytics, tools, and metrics; a member of the editorial advisory board of the Milbank Quarterly, a leading health policy journal; an affiliated professor in the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Science for Progress Initiative; and a fellow at NYU Law School’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy.

Sampat’s research has been funded through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, the RWJF Public Health Law Research Program, the Commonwealth Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, among other sources. He has published across several fields, including in Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, Management Science, The Review of Economic Studies, and The American Economic Review.

Sampat’s current research focuses on three main projects:

  1. The long-run effects of the World War II research effort on U.S. science, innovation, and science and technology policy.
  2. Pharmaceutical patent policy, innovation, competition, and access to medicines in the U.S. and globally.
  3. The economics and historical political economy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

He also works on creating and validating new measures linking publicly funded research investments to private sector patents, drugs, and other socio-economic outcomes — a topic of long-standing interest throughout his career.