The Impact of Academic Patenting on the Rate, Quality, and Direction of (Public) Research Output / Pierre Azoulay, Waverly Ding, Toby Stuart.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Azoulay, Pierre.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Ding, Waverly.

Stuart, Toby.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w11917.

NBER working paper series no. w11917

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Impact of Academic Patenting on the Rate, Quality, and Direction of

The Impact of Academic Patenting on the Rate, Quality, and Direction of

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2006.

Summary:

We examine the influence of faculty patenting activity on the rate, quality, and content of public research outputs in a panel dataset spanning the careers of 3,862 academic life scientists. Using inverse probability of treatment weights (IPTW) to account for the dynamics of self-selection into patenting, we find that patenting has a positive effect on the rate of publication of journal articles, but no effect on the quality of these publications. Using several measures of the "patentability" of the content of research papers, we also find that patenters may be shifting their research focus to questions of commercial interest. We conclude that the often-voiced concern that patenting in academe has a nefarious effect on public research output is, at least in its simplest form, misplaced.

Notes:

Print version record

January 2006.