We know little about the effects of patent licensing because licensing information is notoriously difficult to find. Using publicly available data we construct a novel means of indirectly identifying academic patents that have been licensed to large corporations. We estimate the signaling effects of patent licensing on subsequent innovation. We find that after licensing patents have considerably more citations. The signaling effect of licensing by universities with a large flow of patents is similar for public and private universities. For universities with a small flow of patents, relative to Small public universities, a license of a patent owned by a private university to a large company leads to significantly more citations. The results suggest that licensing of small private university patents sends significantly stronger and more informative signal to out-of-state innovators who, influenced by the perceptions about university technology management practices across different types of universities, might be generally suspicious about the quality and potential of patents owned by small private universities.
