Economists, as well as policy-makers, agree nowadays that university-generated knowledge contributes decisively to the economic growth of nations and local economies. The Bayh-Dole Act introduced in the US in the early 80's, was the key policy initiative aimed at encouraging the commercialization of academic research results. Many observers suggest that the recent technological success of the USA owes a lot to this new “commercial model” of university technology transfer. Similar reforms have now been initiated in many advanced countries and most research universities and public research organizations have set up technology transfer offices (TTOs) which commercialize academic knowledge and manage the rights. France in particular, has adopted a series of policy reforms progressively introducing this new model, aiming at improving the social and economic returns of academic research. We show in this proposal, thanks to a first investigation of the French data that we intend to expand and reliabilize in this project, that if public patenting has significantly raised in the last decade (up to 14% of all patent families in 2012), it is mainly due to a sharp modification in the ownership structure of academic patents that is accompanied by a contrasted evolution of their quality indicators. These first results stress a series of interesting questions that we will address in this project. Are traditional academic incentives aligned with this new goal of contributing to technology transfer? Are the different scenarios of technology transfer associated with different levels of effectiveness, and if so, why? What are the impacts of the recent changes of the legislation and of new policy instruments on technology transfer? To answer these questions, we need to rely on a consistent micro-economic understanding of the new commercial model of university technology transfer, at the interplay between the three typical actors of the transfer: the professor (or researcher), the TTO and the company. On the empirics side, we need to rely on very recent, and very complete data. Therefore, we will match, at the professor and researcher level, individual information, patent data, publication data and project funding data. To some extent, France will be considered as a case study in itself. No such precise and complete empirical analysis has already been performed in any large industrialized country. A survey of academic inventors, interviews of TTO CEOs, as well as case studies on the Bordeaux and Strasbourg sites will complement our information when national wide data are not available. So as to contribute to the policy debate on technology transfer, we will identify the impact of policy initiatives which target only some part of the reference population and evidence the differential behavior of “treated” and their controls. We will also expand our investigations to the European level and exploit cross-country policy variations in time. Our goal is to provide robust policy recommendations to improve (tentatively optimize) university technology transfer. The team members are experts on the issue of academic patenting and technology transfer. They are spread over four sites, but many of them have already collaborated in the past. The cohesiveness of the team, including the strong reliability of the connection with the OST (as data provider) will ensure a timely execution of the project. New collaborations will also be undertaken, by matching, in this project, expertises on microeconomic theory, professional practices, applied micro-econometrics, identification techniques for observational data, and different data collection methods. The project should, in addition, significantly contribute to building a strong French research base on university technology transfer, in connection with policy makers, practitioners and students.

The energy transition cannot be achieved without dramatic changes in our society. The starting point of this research is the observation that the emergence of a huge number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), particularly in the field of environment, constitutes a prominent lever for transforming markets, society and public policies. NGOs are now central actors of policy-making processes as well as initiators of public debates about the needs of environmental policies. They play a critical role in public politics by providing people with information about the environmental state of the world, bringing social and environmental issues to public awareness, and mobilizing support for political action on these issues. They also strongly influence corporate incentives to self-regulate. A better understanding of NGOs behavior and strategies seems thus crucial. However, their analysis has been so far mostly neglected in the economic literature. Most existing works are in political science, sociology, socio-economics, management, and business ethics. And yet economists have tools and approaches (e.g., experimental economics, political economy, and information economics), which could efficiently complement the existing literature. The project will seek to fill this gap. The project addresses six general questions: (1) How can green NGOs’ objectives and constraints be understood and thus modeled? (2) What are the specific strategies and tactics used by NGOs when interacting with corporations? (3) How do they influence corporate behavior? How do they affect firms’ profits? (4) How do they influence consumers and other stakeholders’ perceptions of corporate environmental and social behavior? (5) How and why do NGOs compete with each other, cooperate with corporations, governments or get involved in international negotiations? (6) Do green NGOs substitute or complement public regulators and how their strategies contribute to the energy transition? The research will combine theory and evidence. More specifically, we will develop theoretical models aiming at explaining NGOs strategies; we will construct a dataset describing NGO informational behavior, their funding sources and activities (extracted from press releases, NGOs websites). These data will then be used to test the predictions of some of the models. Although our approach is mostly economic, the main novelty of the project is the acknowledgment that green NGOs are specific political-economic agents whose objectives deserve to be thoroughly examined. In order to provide the basis for a sound understanding of the motive for NGOs objectives, claims and behaviors, the project will also take into consideration the findings of the sociological literature on this topic. The partnership includes highly skilled environmental economists, with deep expertise in industrial organization, welfare economics, behavioral economics and game theory. Until now, some of them have started working on this topic either in isolation or in bilateral collaboration. The ANR support will offer them the opportunity and the means to benefit from synergies by meeting regularly and working together in various configurations.

The current crisis was initially generated by a decrease of housing prices in the US. The subprime crisis had a global impact because toxic assets entered portfolios of private institutions. Today, we can note their financial and real effects, through the implications on the financial and real activities of many countries. The second main point that we learn from the current crisis is that it started as a local phenomenon, but propagated quite quickly all around the world. Because we live in a globalized world and markets are interdependent, it facilitated the transmission of the crisis, which started locally in the US, to the other countries. In this sense this crisis appears as quite different to the previous crises that occurred in the second half of the 20th century and that were much more local as affecting a limited number of countries (e.g. the Asian crisis of the 2000’s). There are however some similarities with the Great Recession of the 30’s with the notable difference that the propagation has been much faster nowadays as a consequence of a much stronger international market integration. The third main instruction concerns economic policies. While monetary and fiscal authorities first reacted using standards instruments and rules, there is now a consensus to conclude that we are in an exceptional economic situation, meaning that new economic policies should be considered. We can for instance have in mind the definition of new monetary rules or the design of fiscal policies with high levels of public debt. These three important aspects require us to understand more deeply the interdependencies between the financial and real spheres of economies. The real effects of asset volatility and bubble bursting should be investigated in the presence or not of financial imperfections. The transmission mechanisms to a globalized economy should be examined taking into account both real and financial spheres. Of course, in this context, new monetary and fiscal policies need to be designed. In this perspective, this project that focuses on the financial and real interdependencies will be organized according to the following three parts: Part 1 / Task 1. Real effects of bubbles and financial assets We focus on the valuation of financial assets and rational bubbles. We are concerned in their volatility and their real effects. A special attempt will be devoted to the implications of heterogeneous behaviors and financial frictions. This last part is addressed providing appropriate microeconomic foundations of the financial frictions. Part 2 / Task 2. Transmission mechanisms of international trade and openness We study the interplay between the financial and real spheres in open economies. We especially focus on the role of openness on asset valuation, bubbles and growth. Our goal is to examine the arbitrages that take place between the financial and good markets, the existence and propagation of speculative bubbles and the effects of capital inflows through international financial markets on growth. Part 3 / Task 3. The role of monetary and fiscal policies We aim to design the role of monetary and fiscal policies when the economy experiences business cycles and financial crises. One focuses on their stabilizing virtues, but also on the optimality of such policies. We are in particular concerned with economies characterized by strong levels of public debt and exceptional events, as it happens following a crisis.