University Innovation and the Professor's Privilege

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 US model, where the university holds majority rights. Using comprehensive data on Norwegian workers, firms, and patents, we find a 50 percent 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 literature on university technology transfer, innovation incentives, and taxes and entrepreneurship are considered. (JEL I23, L26, M13, O31, O33, O34)

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  The American Economic Review

• Publication date

  2016-02-01

• Fields of study

  Political Science, Economics, Education

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1257/AER.20160284
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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