The impact of private ownership, incentives and local development objectives on university technology transfer performance

Sharon Belenzon and Mark Schankerman

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay and local development objectives on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for 1995-99. We find that private universities are much more likely to adopt incentive pay than public ones, 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. Universities with strong local development objectives generate about 30 percent less income per license, but are more likely to license to local (in-state) startup companies. In addition, we show that government constraints on university licensing activity are .costly. in terms of foregone license income and the creation of start-up companies. These results are robust to controls for observed and unobserved heterogeneity.

Keywords: incentives; performance pay; universities; technology transfer; licensing; local development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F23 O31 O32 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2007-09-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:3724

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