What Happens When Firms Patent? New Evidence from U.S. Economic Census Data
January 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-03
Abstract
In this study, we present novel statistics on the patenting in US manufacturing and new evidence on the question of what happens when firms patent. We do so by creating a comprehensive firm-patent matched dataset that links the NBER patent data (covering the universe of patents) to firm data from the US Census Bureau (which covers the universe of all firms with paid employees). Our linked dataset covers more than 48,000 unique assignees (compared to about 4,100 assignees covered by the Compustat-NBER link), representing almost two-thirds of all non-individual, non-university, non-government assignees from 1975 to 1997. We use the data to present some basic but novel statistics on the role of patenting in US manufacturing, including strong evidence confirming the highly skewed nature of patenting activity. Next, we examine what happens when firms patent by looking at a large sample of first time patentees. We find that while there are significant cross-sectional differences in size and total factor productivity between patentee firms and non-patentee firms, changes in patentownership status within firms is associated with a contemporaneous and substantial increase in firm size, but little to no change in total factor productivity. This evidence suggests that patenting is associated with firm growth through new product innovations (firm scope) rather than through reduction in the cost of producing existing products (firm productivity). Consistent with this explanation, we find that when firms patent, there is a contemporaneous increase in the number of products that the firms produce. Estimates of (within-firm) elasticity of firm characteristics to patent stock confirm our results. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of size and productivity, and to various sample selection criteria.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
economist,
manufacturing,
researcher,
statistical,
invention,
corporation,
employee,
merger,
acquisition,
incorporated,
innovation,
inventory,
patent,
patenting,
firms patents,
patented,
patents firms
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Standard Statistical Establishment List,
Service Annual Survey,
Longitudinal Research Database,
Ordinary Least Squares,
Total Factor Productivity,
National Bureau of Economic Research,
Longitudinal Business Database,
Census of Manufacturing Firms
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'What Happens When Firms Patent? New Evidence from U.S. Economic Census Data' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperPirate's Treasure
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-51
Do countries that improve their protection of intellectual property rights gain access to new product varieties from technologically advanced countries? We build the first comprehensive matched firm level data set on exports and patents using confidential microdata from the US Census to address this question. Across several different estimation approaches we find evidence that these protections affect where US firms export.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperNBER Patent Data-BR Bridge: User Guide and Technical Documentation
October 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-36
This note provides details about the construction of the NBER Patent Data-BR concordance, and is intended for researchers planning to use this concordance. In addition to describing the matching process used to construct the concordance, this note provides a discussion of the benefits and limitations of this concordance.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperGrowth Through Heterogeneous Innovations
June 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-08
We study how exploration versus exploitation innovations impact economic growth through a tractable endogenous growth framework that contains multiple innovation sizes, multiproduct firms, and entry/exit. Firms invest in exploration R&D to acquire new product lines and exploitation R&D to improve their existing product lines. We model and show empirically that exploration R&D does not scale as strongly with firm size as exploitation R&D. The resulting framework conforms to many regularities regarding innovation and growth differences across the firm size distribution. We also incorporate patent citations into our theoretical framework. The framework generates a simple test using patent citations that indicates that entrants and small firms have relatively higher growth spillover effects.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperBusiness Dynamic Statistics of Innovative Firms
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-72
A key driver of economic growth is the reallocation of resources from low to high productivity activities. Innovation plays an important role in this regard by introducing new products, services, and business methods that ultimately lead to increased productivity and rising living standards. Traditional measures of innovation, particularly those based on aggregate inputs, are increasingly unable to capture the breadth and depth of innovation in modern economies. In this paper, we describe an effort at the US Census Bureau, the Business Dynamics Statistics of Innovative Firms (BDS-IF) project, which aims to address these challenges by extending the Business Dynamics Statistics data to include new measures of innovative activity. The BDS-IF project will produce measures of firm, establishment, and employment flows by firm age, firm size, and industry for the subset of firms engaged in activities related to innovation. These activities include patenting and trademarking, the employment of STEM workers, and R&D expenditures. The exibility of the underlying data infrastructure allows this measurement agenda to be extended to include copyright activity, management practices, and high growth firms.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperR&D or R vs. D? Firm Innovation Strategy and Equity Ownership
April 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-14
We analyze a unique dataset that separately reports research and development expenditures for a large panel of public and private firms. Definitions of 'research' and 'development' in this dataset, respectively, correspond to definitions of knowledge 'exploration' and 'exploitation' in the innovation theory literature. We can thus test theories of how equity ownership status relates to innovation strategy. We find that public firms have greater research intensity than private firms, inconsistent with theories asserting private ownership is more conducive to exploration. We also find public firms invest more intensely in innovation of all sorts. These results suggest relaxed financing constraints enjoyed by public firms, as well as their diversified shareholder bases, make them more conducive to investing in all types of innovation. Reconciling several seemingly conflicting results in prior research, we find private-equity-owned firms, though not less innovative overall than other private firms, skew their innovation strategies toward development and away from research.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperINTERNATIONAL PATENTING STRATEGIES WITH HETEROGENEOUS FIRMS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-28
This paper analyzes how firms decide where to patent in a heterogeneous firm model of trade with endogenous rival entry. In the model, innovating firms compete with rival firms on price, where rivals force the innovating firm to reduce markups and lower the innovating firm's probability of obtaining monopolistic profits. Patenting allows the innovating firm to reduce the number of rival rms by increasing their fixed overhead costs, thereby providing higher expected profits and increased markups from reduced competition. Countries with higher states of technology, more competition and better patent protection have a greater proportion of entrants who patent. Industries tend to follow a U-shaped pattern of patenting where industries with high heterogeneity in production and low substitution, along with industries with low heterogeneity in production and high substitution patent more frequently. Using a generalized framework of the model, I estimate market-based measures of country-level patent protection, which when compared with other IP indices, suggests that not enough international patenting is taking place. Finally, I test the predictions of the model using a newly available technology-to-industry concordance on bilateral patent flows and show that firms are increasingly sensitive to foreign IP protection. Countries that choose to maximize their IP protection can increase the number of foreign patents by almost 10%.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperGains from Offshoring? Evidence from U.S. Microdata
April 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-20
We construct a new linked data set with over one thousand offshoring events by matching Trade Adjustment Assistance program petition data to micro-data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We exploit this data to assess how offshoring impacts domestic firm-level aggregate employment, output, wages and productivity. A class of models predicts that more productive firms engage in offshoring, and that this leads to gains in output and (measured) productivity, and potential gains in employment and wages, in the remaining domestic activities of the offshoring firm. Consistent with these models, we find that offshoring firms are on average larger and more productive compared to non-offshorers. However, we find that offshorers suffer from a large decline in employment (32 per cent) and output (28 per cent) relative to their peers even in the long run. Further, we find no significant change in average wages or in total factor productivity measures at affected firms. We find these results robust to a variety of checks. Thus we find no evidence for positive spillovers to the remaining domestic activity of firms in this large sampleof offshoring events.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperINNOVATION OUTPUT CHOICES AND CHARACTERISTICS OF FIRMS IN THE U.S.
October 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-42
This paper uses new business micro data from the Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) for the years 2008-2011 to relate the discrete innovation choices made by U.S. companies to features of the company that have long been considered to be important correlates of innovation. We use multinomial logit to model those choices. Bloch and Lopez-Bassols (2009) used the Community Innovation Surveys (CIS) to classify companies according dual, technological or output-based innovation constructs. We found that for each of those constructs of innovation combinations considered, manufacturing and engaging in intellectual property transfer increase the odds of choosing innovation strategies that involve more than one type of categories (for example, both goods and services, or both tech and non-tech) and radical innovations, controlling form size, productivity, time and type of R&D. Company size and company productivity as well as time do not lean the choices in any particular direction. These associations are robust across the three multinomial choice models that we have considered. In contrast with other studies, we have been able to use companies that do and companies that do not innovate, and this has allowed to rule out to some extent selectivity bias.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperHow Does Venture Capital Financing Improve Efficiency in Private Firms? A Look Beneath the Surface
June 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-16
Using a unique sample from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) of the U.S. Census Bureau, we study several related questions regarding the efficiency gains generated by venture capital (VC) investment in private firms. First, does VC backing improve the efficiency (total factor productivity, TFP) of private firms, and are certain kinds of VCs (higher reputation versus lower reputation) better at generating such efficiency gains than others? Second, how are such efficiency gains generated: Do venture capitalists invest in more efficient firms to begin with (screening) or do they improve efficiency after investment (monitoring)? Third, how are these efficiency gains spread out over rounds subsequent to VC investment? Fourth, what are the channels through which such efficiency gains are generated: increases in product market performance (sales) or reductions in various costs (labor, materials, total production costs)? Finally, how do such efficiency gains affect the probability of a successful exit (IPO or acquisition)? Our main findings are as follows. First, the overall efficiency of VC backed firms is higher than that of non-VC backed firms. Second, this efficiency advantage of VC backed firms arises from both screening and monitoring: the efficiency of VC backed firms prior to receiving financing is higher than that of non-VC backed firms and further, the growth in efficiency subsequent to receiving VC financing is greater for such firms relative to non-VC backed firms. Third, the above increase in efficiency of VC backed firms relative to non-VC backed firms increases over the first two rounds of VC financing, and remains at the higher level till exit. Fourth, while the TFP of firms prior to VC financing is lower for higher reputation VC backed firms, the increase in TFP subsequent to financing is significantly higher for the former firms, consistent with higher reputation VCs having greater monitoring ability. Fifth, the efficiency gains generated by VC backing arise primarily from improvement in product market performance (sales); however for higher reputation VCs, the additional efficiency gains arise from both an additional improvement in product market performance as well as from reductions in various input costs. Finally, both the level of TFP of VC backed firms prior to receiving financing and the growth in TFP subsequent to VC financing positively affect the probability of a successful exit (IPO or acquisition).View Full Paper PDF
