Zvi Griliches’ seminal analysis of hybrid corn spawned a large literature seeking to quantify and demonstrate the value of agricultural research and development (R&D) investments. The most important metric for quantifying the rate of return to R&D emerging from this literature is the internal rate of return (IRR), even though Griliches was sceptical of its usefulness as a metric in this context. An alternative metric, also reported by Griliches but not as commonly used in the subsequent returns‐to‐research literature, is the benefit–cost ratio (BCR). We assess how the implications of the returns to agricultural R&D literature may have differed if the BCR had become the standard rather than the IRR. We reveal that the IRR and BCR produce substantially different rankings of agricultural R&D projects, differences that persist even under various commodity and geographical aggregations of the BCR and IRR estimates. The median across 2,627 reported IRRs is 37.5 per cent per year. Using data gleaned from 492 research evaluation studies, we developed and deployed a methodology to impute 2,126 BCRs (median of 5.4) and modified internal rates of returns (MIRRs, median of 16.4 per cent per year) assuming a uniform 10 per cent per year discount rate and a 30 year research timeline.

中文翻译：

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重新校准报告的农业研发收益：如果我们都听从了Griliches怎么办？*

Zvi Griliches对杂交玉米的开创性分析催生了大量文献，试图量化和证明农业研究与开发（R＆D）投资的价值。量化来自此文献的R＆D回报率的最重要指标是内部收益率（IRR），尽管Griliches怀疑其在这种情况下作为指标的有效性。Griliches也报告了另一种度量标准，即效益成本比（BCR），但在随后的研究回报文献中并不常用。我们评估了如果BCR成为标准而非IRR，则农业R＆D文献收益回报的含义可能会有所不同。我们发现，内部收益率和BCR对农业研发项目的排名差异很大，即使在BCR和IRR估算的各种商品和地理汇总下，差异仍然存在。报告的内部收益率在2,627个中位数中，每年为37.5％。我们使用从492个研究评估研究中收集的数据，开发并采用了一种方法来估算2126个BCR（中位数为5.4）并修改了内部收益率（MIRR，中位数为每年16.4％），假设每年平均折让10％率和30年的研究时间表。