The Impact of Academic Patenting on (Public) Research Output

Abstract

We examine the influence of university-employed scientists’ transitions to patenting on the rate of publication and of obtaining NIH grants in a panel dataset spanning the careers of 4,270 academic life scientists. Using inverse probability of treatment weights (IPTW) to account for the dynamics of self-selection into patenting, we find that patenting has a positive eect on the rate of publication of journal articles, and a much smaller — though still positive — eect on NIH grant awards. We also find that patenters may be shifting their research focus to questions of commercial interest, as evidenced by a positive eect of patenting in regressions of the rate of publication of papers that are coauthored with researchers in industry. We conclude that the often-voiced concern that patenting in academe has a nefarious eect of on public research output is, at least in its simplest form, misplaced.

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