Impact of Academic Patenting on the Rate, Quality, and Direction of (Public) Research Output

The authors examine the influence of faculty patenting activity on the rate, quality, and content of public research outputs in a panel dataset spanning the careers of 3,862 academic life scientists. Using inverse probability of treatment weights to account for the dynamics of self-selection into patenting, they find that patenting has a positive effect on the rate of publication of journal articles, but no effect on the quality of these publications.