Efficiency of university–industry collaboration and its determinants: evidence from Chinese leading universities

ABSTRACT

This paper applies the two-stage double bootstrap DEA to evaluate the university–industry (U–I) collaboration efficiency of 71 Chinese universities. In the first stage, we evaluate unbiased efficiency scores by using the bootstrap DEA method. Results show that the U–I collaboration efficiency of leading universities has fluctuated slightly from 2007 to 2015. In the second stage, we perform truncated regressions to explore underlying determinants of estimated efficiency. We found that the U–I collaboration efficiency is determined by a university’s characteristics, scientific research fund from the government, and regional economic status. We also found heterogeneous effects across samples.

KEYWORDS:

• Efficiency
• third mission
• university–industry collaboration

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C14
• C34
• H52
• I23
• O31
• O32

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ ‘985 Project’ is a subset of ‘211 Project’.

² Although not all, most of the university technology transfer contracts are signed with the companies. Therefore, we can only use this indicator to replace one of the U–I cooperation output, in that the number of university technology transfer contracts to companies cannot be obtained.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China with the project number: [71572188].