Assessing the impact of university science parks on research productivity: exploratory firm-level evidence from the United Kingdom

University science parks are alleged to stimulate technological spillovers. However, there is virtually no empirical evidence on the impact of these facilities on research productivity. We begin to fill this gap by examining whether companies located on university science parks in the United Kingdom have higher research productivity than observationally equivalent firms not located on a university science park. The preliminary results appear to be consistent with this hypothesis and are robust to the use of alternative econometric procedures to assess relative productivity. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.