Do Local Conditions Determine the Direction of Science? Evidence from Land Grant Colleges

Abstract

We quantify the extent to which land grant colleges were located in counties that grow different crops than the rest of their states, which we call agricultural unrepresentativeness. We find that land grant colleges located in agriculturally unrepresentative counties tended to produce research focusing on more unrepresentative crops. We find similar results when exploiting historical college site selection natural experiments to identify exogenous variation in the agricultural unrepresentativeness of the college county. Moreover, we find that colleges in agriculturally unrepresentative locations created more geographically limited productivity spillovers.