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

This paper investigates the presence and sources of economies of scope in R&D production at U.S. research universities. The analysis evaluates the tradeoffs or synergies arising between traditional university research outputs (articles and doctorates) and a more recent and burgeoning output: academic patents. Using a shortage function, we propose a decomposition of economies of scope (decomposition which includes complementarity effects and scale effects). R&D input and output data from 92 public and private research universities are used to obtain non-parametric estimates of scope economies. The results show significant variations in economies of scope and sources by size and type of university.