This paper explores recent trends in the size of scientific teams and in institutional collaborations. The data derive from 2.4 million scientific papers written in 110 top U.S. research universities over the period 1981-1999. The top 110 account for a large share of published basic research conducted in the U.S. during this time.We measure team size by the number of authors on a scientific paper. Using this measure we find that team size increases by 50% over the 19-year period. We supplement team size with measures of domestic and foreign institutional collaborations, which capture the geographic dispersion of team workers. The time series evidence suggests that the trend towards more geographically dispersed scientific teams accelerates beginning with papers published at the start of the 1990s. This acceleration suggests a sharp decline in the cost of collaboration. Our hypothesis is that the decline is due to the deployment of the National Science Foundation's NSFNET and its connection to networks in Europe and Japan after 1987.Using a panel of top university departments we also find that private universities and departments whose scientists have earned prestigious awards participate in larger teams, as do departments that have larger amounts of federal funding. Placement of former graduate students is a key determinant of institutional collaborations, especially collaborations with firms and with foreign scientific institutions. Finally, the evidence suggests that scientific output and influence increase with team size and that influence rises along with institutional collaborations. Since increasing team size implies an increase in the division of labor, these results suggest that scientific productivity increases with the scientific division of labor.

We use the Survey of Doctorate Recipients to examine the question of who in US universities is patenting. Because standard methods of estimation are not directly applicable, we use a zero-inflated negative binomial model to estimate the patent equation, using instruments for the number of articles to avoid problems of endogeneity. We also estimate the patent model using the generalized method of moments estimation of count data models with endogenous regressors. We find work context and field to be important predictors of the number of patent applications. We also find patents to be positively and significantly related to the number of publications. This finding is robust to the choice of instruments and method of estimation. The cross-sectional nature of the data preclude an examination of whether a trade-off exists between publishing and patenting, holding individual characteristics constant over time. But the strong cross-sectional correlation that we find does not suggest that commercialization has come at the expense of placing knowledge in the public domain.Academic research productivity, Patenting, Publishing, Technology transfer, Count data models, Bayh-Dole Act,

Doctoral education in science and engineering is critical to the university’s role in fostering economic development. One aspect of this is the placement of recent graduates with firms. Despite the role Ph.D.s play in this process, little work has documented and analyzed these firm placements. This article takes a first step at rectifying this deficiency, using data from the 1997-1999 Survey of Earned Doctorates administered by the National Science Foundation to all doctoral recipients in the United States. The authors show that knowledge sources, as measured by the training location of new Ph.D.s going to industry, are concentrated in different geographic centers from those that university R&Dexpenditure data would suggest. The authors also find significant outflows from the Midwest of Ph.D.s and significant inflows to the Pacific and northeast regions of the country. The authors’work suggests that many states fail to capture the economic development advantages that come from training a skilled work force.

"We estimate a knowledge production function for university patenting using an individual effects negative binomial model. We control for Research and Development expenditures, research field, and the presence of a Technology Transfer Office. We distinguish between three kinds of researchers: faculty, postdoctoral scholars (postdocs), and PhD students. For the latter two, we also distinguish by visa status. We find patent counts to relate positively and significantly to the number of PhD students and number of postdocs. Our results also suggest that not all graduate students and postdocs contribute equally to patenting but that contribution is mediated by citizenship and visa status." (JEL C25, O31, O32, O34, O38) Copyright (c) 2008 Western Economic Association International.

Universities play an important role in the production of knowledge in the United States, authoring nearly 75 percent (fractional counts) of scientifi c and engineering articles written in the country. 1 Within the university, research is often performed with the assistance of graduate students, postdoctoral scholars (postdocs), and staff scientists, many of whom are foreign-born and foreign-educated. Currently, for example, over 45 percent of graduate students enrolled in science and engineering (S&E) are foreignborn and approximately 60 percent of postdocs are on temporary visas. This chapter documents the presence and importance of graduate students and postdocs in US academic science. We are particularly interested in the role of the foreign-born and foreign-trained. We begin by examining the importance of teams in university research and then provide an overview of the way in which university research is fi nanced and structured. Next we summarize trends in the number and proportion of foreign-born graduate