Adam B. Jaffe Profile Picture

Adam B. Jaffe

Fred C Hecht Professor in Economics Emeritus at Brandeis University and Senior Research Fellow at Motu Economic and Policy Research in Wellington New Zealand

Adam B. Jaffe is Fred C Hecht Professor in Economics Emeritus at Brandeis University and Senior Research Fellow at Motu Economic and Policy Research in Wellington New Zealand. From 2013-17 he was Director and Senior Fellow at Motu. He came to Motu from Brandeis where he had been Chair of Economics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Jaffe's research focuses on the economics of research and innovation, particularly the relationship between public research and commercial innovation, the measurement of the impacts of research, and the role of the patent system.

He is an Editor of Research Policy and the Chair of the U.S. National Academies Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy. In 2015-17, he was Co-Chair of the OECD Global Science Forum Experts’ Group on “Effective Operation of Competitive Research Funding Systems.” In 1990-91 he served as Senior Staff Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Jaffe is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and two books—Patents, Citations and Innovations: A Window on the Knowledge Economy (with Manuel Trajtenberg, 2002); and Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress and What to Do About It (with Josh Lerner, 2004). He is also the editor (with Ben Jones, 2015) of The Changing Frontier: Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy.

Jaffe is Principal Investigator for the Sloan-Foundation-funded Innovation Information Initiative (https://iii.pubpub.org/), which is building a network of researchers to foster standardized sharing through open access of innovation metrics based on patent data.

Jaffe received S.B. (Chemistry) and S.M. (Technology and Policy) degrees from M.I.T. and the Ph.D. (Economics) from Harvard.