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,...

Around 1875 the U.S. had none of the world's leading research universities; today, it accounts for the majority of the top-ranked. Many observers cite events surrounding World War II as the source of this reversal. We present evidence that U.S. research universities had surpassed most countries'...

Using a survey of AFA members, we analyze how demographics, time allocation, production mechanisms, and institutional factors affect research production during the pandemic. Consistent with the literature, research productivity falls more for women and faculty with young children. Independently...

Introduction / Caroline M. Hoxby and Kevin Stange -- What Healthcare Teaches Us about Measuring Productivity in Higher Education / Douglas Staiger -- The Productivity of U.S. Postsecondary Institutions / Caroline M. Hoxby -- Labor Market Outcomes and Postsecondary Accountability: Are Imperfect...

This paper examines the empirical anomaly that in a sample of 5811 patents on which US faculty are listed as inventors, 26% of the patents are assigned solely to firms rather than to the faculty member's university as is dictated by US university employment policies or the Bayh Dole Act. In this...

This paper explores recent trends in the size of scientific teams and in institutional collaborations. The data derive from 2.4 million scientific papers written in 110 leading U.S. research universities over the period 1981-1999. We measure team size by the number of authors on a scientific...

This paper provides systematic empirical evidence for the distinctive role of universities on local entrepreneurial ecosystems. Assessing the impact of research institutions on entrepreneurship is challenging, given that these institutions are often located in economic and innovation...

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...

Are laboratory safety practices a tax on scientific productivity? We examine this question by exploiting the substantial increase in safety regulations at the University of California following the shocking death of a research assistant in 2008. Difference-in-differences analyses show that...

University-based scientific research has long been argued to be a central source of commercial innovation and economic growth. Yet at the same time, there have been long-held concerns that many university-based discoveries never realize their potential social benefits. Looking across...