The Impact of Private Ownership, Incentives and Local Development Objectives on University Technology Transfer Performance
(2007)Abstract
We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay and local development objectives onuniversity licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technologylicensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for1995-99. We find that private universities are much more likely to adopt incentive pay than publicones, but ownership does not affect licensing performance conditional on the use of incentive pay.Adopting incentive pay is associated with about 30-40 percent more income per license. Universitieswith strong local development objectives generate about 30 percent less income per license, but aremore likely to license to local (in-state) startup companies. In addition, we show that governmentconstraints on university licensing activity are .costly. in terms of foregone license income and thecreation of start-up companies. These results are robust to controls for observed and unobserved heterogeneity.