University Innovation and the Professor's Privilege

Hans Hvide and Benjamin Jones

No 22057, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: National policies take varied approaches to encouraging university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural experiment: the end of the “professor’s privilege” in Norway, where university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their innovations. Upon the reform, Norway moved toward the typical U.S. model, where the university holds majority rights. Using comprehensive data on Norwegian workers, firms, and patents, we find a 50% decline in both entrepreneurship and patenting rates by university researchers after the reform. Quality measures for university start-ups and patents also decline. Applications to literatures on university technology transfer, innovation incentives, and taxes and entrepreneurship are considered.

JEL-codes: L26 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-ino and nep-sbm
Note: PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Hans K. Hvide & Benjamin F. Jones, 2018. "University Innovation and the Professor's Privilege," American Economic Review, vol 108(7), pages 1860-1898.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22057.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: University Innovation and the Professor's Privilege (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22057

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22057

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().