Research and Development at U.S. Research Universities: An Analysis of Scope Economies

This work investigates the presence and sources of economies of scope in R&D at U.S. research universities. The analysis evaluates the tradeoffs and synergies arising between traditional university research outputs (articles and doctorates) and academic patents. We propose a new measure of economies of scope based on a primal representation of the underlying technology. We derive a decomposition of economies of scope which identifies its sources (e.g., complementarity effects and scale effects). Non-parametric estimates of scope economies using R&D input and output data from 92 research universities show significant economies of scope between articles and patents, but modest complementarities.