About

Pierre Azoulay is the International Programs Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management, MIT. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Progress. His research focuses on the organization of the "ideas sector" of the economy and investigates how different institutional arrangements impact innovation. Specifically, he studies how institutional design influences not only the quantity of knowledge produced but also its direction and character, including which questions are asked, who is able to ask them, and the level of risk scientists are willing to undertake. His current research projects include examining management practices and culture in a large sample of biomedical research laboratories and exploring project choice in structural biology. At MIT Sloan, Pierre Azoulay teaches courses in competitive strategy, technology strategy, platform strategy, and a PhD seminar on the economics of ideas and innovation. Alongside Danielle Li, he coordinates the PhD program in Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategy (TIES). He holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA from Michigan State University, and a Diplôme d’Études Supérieures de Gestion from Institut Mines-Télécom Business School.

Research topics

• Economics
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Business
• Economic growth
• Epistemology
• Neoclassical economics
• Marketing
• Positive economics
• Demographic economics
• Finance

Selected publications

• Canopy Systems: Building a R&D Portfolio

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-01-05

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Pierre Azoulay

  PublisherDOI

• Canopy Systems: Building a R&D Portfolio

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-01-05

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Pierre Azoulay

  PublisherDOI

• Does Peer Review Penalize Scientific Risk Taking? Evidence from NIH Grant Renewals

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Paper tiger? Chinese science and home bias in citations

  Journal of International Economics · 2025-06-25 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We investigate the phenomenon of home bias in scientific citations, where researchers disproportionately cite work from their own country. We develop a benchmark for expected citations based on the relative size of countries, defining home bias as deviations from this norm. Our findings reveal that China exhibits the largest home bias across all major countries and in nearly all scientific fields studied. This stands in contrast to the pattern of home bias for China’s trade in goods and services, where China does not stand out from most industrialized countries. After adjusting citation counts for home bias, we demonstrate that China’s apparent rise in citation rankings is overstated. Our adjusted ranking places China fourth globally, behind the US, the UK, and Germany, tempering the perception of China’s scientific dominance.

  PublisherDOI

• Old Moats for New Models: Openness, Control, and Competition in Generative Artificial Intelligence

  Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Drawing insights from the field of innovation economics, we discuss the likely competitive environment shaping generative artificial intelligence (AI) advances. Central to our analysis are the concepts of appropriability (whether firms in the industry are able to control the knowledge generated by their innovations) and complementary assets (whether effective entry requires access to specialized infrastructure and capabilities to which incumbent firms can ration access). Although the rapid improvements in AI foundation models promise transformative impacts across broad sectors of the economy, we argue that tight control over complementary assets will likely result in a concentrated market structure, as in past episodes of technological upheaval. We suggest the likely paths through which incumbent firms may restrict entry, confining newcomers to subordinate roles and stifling broad sectoral innovation. We conclude with speculations regarding how this oligopolistic future might be averted. Policy interventions aimed at fractionalizing or facilitating shared access to complementary assets might help preserve competition and incentives for extending the generative AI frontier. Ironically, the best hopes for a vibrant open-source AI ecosystem might rest on the presence of a “rogue” technology giant, which might choose openness and engagement with smaller firms as a strategic weapon wielded against other incumbents.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Peer Review Penalize Scientific Risk Taking? Evidence from NIH Grant Renewals

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-02-01 · 7 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Scientific projects that carry a high degree of risk may be more likely to lead to breakthroughs yet also face challenges in winning the support necessary to be carried out. We analyze the determinants of renewal for more than 100, 000 R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health between 1980 and 2015. We use four distinct proxies to measure risk taking: extreme tail outcomes, disruptiveness, pivoting from an investigator’s prior work, and standing out from the crowd in one’s field. After carefully controlling for investigator, grant, and institution characteristics, we measure the association between risk taking and grant renewal. Across each of these measures, we find that risky grants are renewed at markedly lower rates than less risky ones. We also provide evidence that the magnitude of the risk penalty is magnified for more novel areas of research and novice investigators, consistent with the academic community’s perception that current scientific institutions do not motivate exploratory research adequately.

  PublisherDOI

• What if NIH had been 40% smaller?

  Science · 2025-09-25 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research.

  PublisherDOI

• Indirect Cost Recovery in U.S. Innovation Policy: History, Evidence, and Avenues for Reform

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Paper Tiger? Chinese Science and Home Bias in Citations

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Brief of Scholars of Economics and Innovation as Amici Curiae in Support of Plaintiffs-Appellees in Massachusetts v. NIH

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• AGING AND THE PRODUCTION OF HIGH-IMPACT AND TRANSFORMATIVE RESEARCH

  NIH · $9.7M · 2022

Frequent coauthors

• Joshua Graff Zivin

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  93 shared

• Brian Jacob

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  49 shared

• Daniel Yi Xu

  49 shared

• Peter Hull

  John Brown University

  49 shared

• Raymond Fisman

  49 shared

• Xiaoxia Shi

  Baogang Group (China)

  49 shared

• Benjamin Handel

  Berkeley College

  49 shared

• Kareen Rozen

  John Brown University

  49 shared