University Research and Technology Transfer: A Competing Risks Approach

The paper uses a competing risk approach to characterize the process of transferring technology from University of California, San Diego to start-up and established firms. Licensing technology is formalized in my proposed framework as a mechanism in which both types of firms compete to license a given invention. The main purpose of the analysis is to identify the differences between the two processes: start-up licensing process and established firm licensing process. These differences refer to the quality of technology licensed by the two types of firm and the speed of licensing the technologies after disclosure.In addition, the methodology and results of the paper provide a deeper understanding of the managerial decisions of firm creation and can help policymakers at the state and federal level design commercialization and licensing policies that can lead to a successful commercialization of inventions with beneficial impact on consumers and society overall. The empirical analysis uses a unique panel data set obtained from the Technology Transfer & Intellectual Property Services at University of California at San Diego1, consisting of 406 cases of invention disclosures between1971-20032. Start-up firms are firms founded on the basis of inventions licensed from UCSD by the scientific inventors of the respective inventions. Inventor-founded firms are arguably better match for the respective inventions due to the informational advantage of the founders in the use of the technology licensed.The results show that start-up firms generally license the inventions faster than the established firms, due to the asymmetric information about the potential value of the invention. In addition, estimates of the quality characteristics of inventions bring evidence that start-up firms license higher quality inventions than established firms. Key words: start-ups, competing risks, licensing, university research, citations, secrecie

Quality and Beliefs in the Market for University Inventions A model of bargaining with Private Information

The paper analyzes the efficiency implications for the licensing process of university inventions when firms can use the secrecy device. Secrecy is a confidential agreement used by the firms to learn about the quality of inventions prior to licensing. I use a bargaining model with one-side private information to analyze the extent to which the secrecy device improves the efficiency of the licensing process. The decision to enter a secrecy agreement is determined by the uncertainty about the underlying quality of inventions. The bargaining model assumes that the university/inventor has private information about the value of invention and that firms use secrecies as costly device to guarantee the quality of the invention. The main results show that the secrecy device increases the efficiency of the licensing process and that the gains in efficiency are proportional with the difference between the established firm’s cost of production and the inventor’s cost of production. Keywords: bargaining, asymmetric information, private information, adverse selection, Bayesian updating               

Financial Investment Management: Testing the Market Model on the Romanian Capital Market during the Post Financial Crisis

This article presents an analysis of the decision of investing in the capital market in Romania during 2009-2010, in the context of overcoming the global financial crisis. In the first part of the paper, we have made a brief presentation of the simplified model of market analysis introduced in the specialized literature by William Sharpe, the respective model representing the starting point in our study. The purpose of the present study is to emphasize how the evolutions of the financial securities rates listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange could be explained based on the evolution of BET Romanian capital market index. Although the study over this phenomenon has begun in the middle of the last century, every day new studies appear that are either coming in addition to the already existing ones or are bringing a new approach regarding the financial theory. The novelty of the present study conducted by us resides in the highlighting of the evolutions of the financial securities rates during July 2009 – December 2010 periods. The second part of the paper presents the results of a study conducted on the Romanian capital market, emphasizing the correlations between the most important securities on the Romanian capital market, as parts of BET index and market index. The aim is to check whether during this period the evolution of the financial securities’ return can be explained more or less by the return of the capital market.financial market model, return of financial securities, security-market correlation.