Historically, commercial use of university research has been viewed in terms of spillovers. Recently, there has been a dramatic increase in technology transfer through licensing as universities attempt to appropriate the returns from faculty research. This change has prompted concerns regarding...

We examine commonly observed forms of payment, such as milestones, royalties, or consulting contracts as ways of engaging inventors in the development of licensed inventions. Our theoretical model shows that when milestones are feasible, royalties are not optimal unless the licensing firm is...

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of university licensing to explain why university license contracts often include payment types that differ from the fixed fees and royalties typically examined by economists. Our findings suggest that milestone payments and annual payments are...

The growth of high-technology clusters in the United States suggests the presence of strong regional agglomeration effects that reflect proximity to universities or other research institutions. Using data on licensed patents from the University of California, Stanford University, and Columbia...

This paper uses a large language model to develop an ex-ante measure of the commercial potential of scientific findings. In addition to validating the measure against the typical holdout sample, we validate it externally against 1.) the progression of scientific findings through a major...

This article examines the involvement of agricultural and life science faculty at U.S. land grant universities in two types of university-industry relations: academic engagement (sponsored research, industry collaborations, and presentations), academic commercialization (patenting, licensing,...

A defiining feature of modern economic growth is the systematic application of science to advance technology. However, despite sustained progress in scientific knowledge, recent productivity growth in the U.S. has been disappointing. We review major changes in the American innovation ecosystem...

Over the past few decades, public universities have faced significant declines in state funding per student. We investigate whether these declines affected the educational and research outcomes of these schools. We present evidence that declining funding induced public universities to shift...

This paper proposes a novel approach to measure disclosure in patent applications using algorithms from computational linguistics. Borrowing methods from the literature on second language acquisition, we analyze core linguistic features of 40,949 U.S. applications in three patent categories...

U.S. universities have experienced a shift in research funding away from federal and towards private industry sources. This paper evaluates whether the source of funding - federal or private industry - is relevant for commercialization of research outputs. We link person-level grant data from 22...