En la serie NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES, vse ha publicado el paper de Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Caroline M. Hoxby, Andreu Mas-Colell y André Sapir, “THE GOVERNANCE AND PERFORMANCE OF RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES: EVIDENCE FROM EUROPE AND THE U.S.” – Working Paper 14851.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14851
Presentación
The Governance and Performance of Research Universities
Highly productive universities both control their own destinies and face stiff external competition, according to a recent NBER Working Paper.
In The Governance and Performance of Research Universities: Evidence from Europe and the U.S. (NBER Working Paper No. 14851), authors Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Caroline M. Hoxby, Andreu Mas-Colell, and André Sapir construct an index of research productivity that is based on the Shanghai Ranking of World Universities, which includes measures of patents, the number of alumni who have won Nobel Prizes in science, publications appearing in citation indices, or numbers of highly cited researchers. Combining the Shanghai Ranking — which awards 500 points to the best university — with the results from a survey of governance policies at 196 European universities, the authors find that “the average Shanghai ranking for a European university that must get its budget approved by the government is just above 200 while the average ranking for a European university that does not need budget approval is 316. In general, each percentage of a university’s budget that comes from core government funds reduces its rank by 3.2 points.”
European universities required to pay the same amount to all faculty members with the same seniority and rank have an average Shanghai ranking of 213. Universities free to pay faculty as they see fit have an average ranking of 322. Universities free to select undergraduate students as they see fit have a Shanghai ranking 156 points higher than those in which the government determines who will attend. Competition also improves research quality. Each percentage of a university’s budget that comes from competitive research grants increases its ranking by 6.5 points.
The NBER researchers find that in Sweden and the United Kingdom universities with high autonomy have high Shanghai ranking scores, while in Spain and the United Kingdom universities with low autonomy have low rankings. The results for state universities in the United States are similar. Research productivity is highest for schools in states that allow more autonomy, such as independent purchasing systems, no state approval of the university budget, and complete control of personnel hiring and pay. States with high rankings and high autonomy include Washington, Colorado, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. States with low rankings and low autonomy include Arkansas, South Carolina, Kansas, and Louisiana.
Perhaps autonomous universities respond to competition for research funds by developing more productive, inventive, or efficient research programs. The authors seek to show how autonomy and competition affect research productivity by exploiting survey data on the wide variations in those variables among colleges in the U.S. states. Their results confirm that competition increases research productivity. In New Jersey, a highly competitive environment, an increase in exogenous research university expenditure per person increases patenting by residents of that state. In Arkansas, New Mexico, and Maine, where autonomy is low and competition is lackluster, additional spending on research universities may be wasted and may even reduce over-all patenting. Private research universities, which by definition have more autonomy, produce the most patents for any exogenous spending increase. Additional exogenous spending on 2-year colleges generally added little to research productivity during their sample period, and, in some states, may have reduced it.
— Linda Gorman
Conclusiones
In this paper, we investigate how university governance affects research output, measured by the Shanghai index and patents. We start by showing that university autonomy and competition are positively correlated with university output, both among European countries and among U.S. states. We then perform causal tests of a sufficient condition for universities’ being more productive when they are more autonomous and face more competition. The analysis suggests that autonomy and competition increase the inventive output from a given expenditure by research universities or baccalaureate colleges.
Autonomy and competition do not appear to matter much for 2-year colleges, which are essentially vocational. Vocational colleges may mainly generate patents that are imitative–that is, practical adaptations of existing technologies. In contrast, research universities may mainly generate patents for innovations at the frontier of technology. Because governments are unlikely to know what frontier research is most promising, they may run merit-based competitions among universities for research funds. We present evidence that suggests that, by giving more generous stakes for research competitions, governments can make research universities use their funding better, use their autonomy better, and response more productively to local competition.
We note that expenditures at research universities do not increase patenting in states that are far from the technological frontier, have low autonomy public universities, and have little competition from private universities. These three circumstances are a bad package for the productivity of research universities.
The most natural overall interpretation of our results is that frontier research is a complex thing that a university can only pursue effectively if it has the discretion to direct resources and researchers towards what it believes are the most promising paths. Universities will put more effort into directing resources well if they knows that rewards are allocated based on competition, especially competition that is strictly merit-based.