Aggregate evidence of localized academic knowledge transfer in the U.S.

Technology transfer and, more broadly, knowledge spillover from universities to industry has become increasingly studied as universities have become charged with driving local economic growth. This study offers several empirical improvements over prior efforts to measure the aggregate local effects of academic research. It uses counts of scientific publications and citations as more direct measures of academic knowledge than R&D spending. It makes use of panel data with greater breadth and depth: the sample covers all 105 U.S. metropolitan areas with significant academic research and spans 22 years. The positive local geographic association between university research and private-sector patenting found in prior studies is reaffirmed. There is some indication that this relationship strengthened in the last quarter of the sample, 1994-1999, suggesting that academic research was becoming more important to innovation in the 1990s. However, the volume of academic research was not found to have an effect on the rate of citations received by patents.