Mowery and Ziedonis.

• Position: Economists - Brief Article

Mowery and Ziedonis find that the Bayh-Dole Act had only a modest effect on the content of academic research and patenting at Stanford and the University of California. The most significant change in the content of research at these universities was the rise of biomedical research and inventive activity. But the Bayh-Dole Act had little to do with this growth; indeed, the rise in biomedical research and inventions in both of these universities predates the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act. Both University of California and Stanford University administrators intensified their efforts to market faculty inventions in the wake of the Bayh-Dole Act. This enlargement of the pool of marketed inventions appears to have reduced the average "yield" (defined as the share of license contracts yielding positive revenues) of this population at both schools. But Mowery and Ziedonis find no decline in the "importance" or "generality" of the post-1980 patents of...