TY - JOUR AU - Aghion,Philippe AU - Dewatripont,Mathias AU - Hoxby,Caroline M. AU - Mas-Colell,Andreu AU - Sapir,André TI - The Governance and Performance of Research Universities: Evidence from Europe and the U.S. JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14851 PY - 2009 Y2 - April 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14851 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14851.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Philippe Aghion Department of Economics Harvard University 1805 Cambridge St Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/495-6675 Fax: 617/495-4341 E-Mail: paghion@fas.harvard.edu Mathias Dewatripont Universite Libre de Bruxelles E-Mail: mathias.dewatripont@ulb.ac.be Caroline M. Hoxby Department of Economics Stanford University Landau Building, 579 Serra Mall Stanford, CA 94305 Tel: 650-725-8719 Fax: 650-725-5702 E-Mail: choxby@stanford.edu Andreu Mas-Colell Universitat Pompeu Fabra E-Mail: andreu.mas-colell@upf.edu André Sapir Universite Libre de Bruxelles E-Mail: asapir@ulb.ac.be M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2009-06-01 AB - We investigate how university governance affects research output, measured by patenting and international university research rankings. For both European and U.S. universities, we generate several measures of autonomy, governance, and competition for research funding. We show that university autonomy and competition are positively correlated with university output, both among European countries and among U.S. public universities. We then identity a (political) source of exogenous shocks to funding of U.S. universities. We demonstrate that, when a state's universities receive a positive funding shock, they produce more patents if they are more autonomous and face more competition from private research universities. Finally, we show that during periods when merit-based competitions for federal research funding have been most prominent, universities produce more patents when they receive an exogenous funding shock, suggesting that routine participation in such competitions hones research skill. ER -