R&D portfolios and pharmaceutical licensing

We examine how R&D portfolios of drug pipelines affect pharmaceutical licensing, controlling firm size, diversity, and competition. The data collected comprises 434 license-ins and 329 license-outs closed by 54 Japanese pharmaceutical companies between 1997 and 2007. We pay special attention to stage-specific licensing by dividing the innovation process into early and late stages. Joint estimates of license-in and license-out using seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) reveal that drug pipelines significantly affect stage-specific licensing, inducing portfolio effect that lead to smoothing drug pipelines across early and late stages.