China’s Bayh-Dole Act and university patenting: a contingency perspective

Around the world, universities are playing an increasingly important role in the technological development of industries. Many counties emulate policies like the Bayh-Dole Act in the US by giving universities full property rights of government-funded research. Bayh-Dole-like laws have been empirically examined with mixed findings, but few studies have considered the institutional conditions and investigated the causal effect of the Bayh-Dole like policy in developing and transition economies like China. Based on the 2002 Bayh-Dole-like reform in China, we conduct the difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis at the university-IPC level and find that China’s 2002 Bayh-Dole Act increased university-owned patents significantly. In addition, universities with higher prestige (supported by Project 211) and located in areas with better market conditions benefit the most from the Act.