In which regions do universities patent and publish more?

The main objective of this contribution is to test whether university patents share common determinants with university publications at regional level. We build some university production functions with 1,519 patents and 180,239 publications for the 17 Spanish autonomous regions (NUTS-2) in a time span of 14 years (1988-2001). We use econometric models to estimate their determinants. Our results suggest that there is little scope for regional policy to compensate the production of patents vs. publications through different university or joint research institutional settings. On the contrary, while patents are more reactive to expenditure on R&D, publications are more responsive to the number of researchers, so the sustained promotion of both will make it compatible for regions their joint production. However, standing out in the generation of both outputs requires costly investment in various inputs.