Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'firms patents'
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Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 12
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Working PaperProperty Rights, Firm Size and Investments in Innovation: Evidence from the America Invents Act
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-31
I analyze whether a change in patent systems differentially affects firm-level innovation investments at patent-valuing firms of different sizes. Using legally required, economically representative, U.S. Census Bureau microdata, I separate firms into groups based on a firm's response to a question asking it to rank the degree of patent importance to its business and firm-size. I then measure how firms' innovation inputs/outputs respond to the America Invents Act (AIA). Results show the AIA reduced innovation investments at smaller, patent-valuing firms while increasing innovation investments at larger, patent-valuing firms, highlighting differential firm-size effects of patent policy and policy's importance to investments.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperGrowth is Getting Harder to Find, Not Ideas
April 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-21
Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that "ideas are getting harder to find." We build a new 46-year panel tracking the universe of U.S. firms' patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. Over our sample period, we find that researchers' patenting productivity is increasing, there is little evidence of any secular decline in high-quality patenting common to all firms, and the link between patents and growth is present, differs by type of idea, and is fairly stable. On the other hand, we find strong evidence of secular decreases in output unrelated to patenting, suggesting an important role for other factors. Together, these results invite renewed empirical and theoretical attention to the impact of ideas on growth. To that end, our patent-firm bridge, which will be available to researchers with approved access, is used to produce new, public-use statistics on the Business Dynamics of Patenting Firms (BDS-PF).View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperPatents, Innovation, and Market Entry
September 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-45
Do patents facilitate market entry and job creation? Using a 2014 Supreme Court decision that limited patent eligibility and natural language processing methods to identify invalid patents, I find that large treated firms reduce job creation and create fewer new establishments in response, with no effect on new firm entry. Moreover, companies shift toward innovation aimed at improving existing products consistent with the view that patents incentivize creative destruction.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperImproving Patent Assignee-Firm Bridge with Web Search Results
August 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-31
This paper constructs a patent assignee-firm longitudinal bridge between U.S. patent assignees and firms using firm-level administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We match granted patents applied between 1976 and 2016 to the U.S. firms recorded in the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) in the Census Bureau. Building on existing algorithms in the literature, we first use the assignee name, address (state and city), and year information to link the two datasets. We then introduce a novel search-aided algorithm that significantly improves the matching results by 7% and 2.9% at the patent and the assignee level, respectively. Overall, we are able to match 88.2% and 80.1% of all U.S. patents and assignees respectively. We contribute to the existing literature by 1) improving the match rates and quality with the web search-aided algorithm, and 2) providing the longest and longitudinally consistent crosswalk between patent assignees and LBD firms.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperInnovation and Appropriability: Revisiting the Role of Intellectual Property
March 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-09
It is more than 25 years since the authors of the Yale and Carnegie surveys studied how firms seek to protect the rents from innovation. In this paper, we revisit that question using a nationally representative sample of firms over the period 2008-2015, with the goal of updating and extending a set of stylized facts that has been influential for our understanding of the economics of innovation. There are five main findings. First, while patenting firms are relatively uncommon in the economy, they account for an overwhelming share of R&D spending. Second, utility patents are considered less important than other forms of IP protection, like trade secrets, trademarks, and copyrights. Third, industry differences explain a great deal of the level of firms' engagement with IP, with high-tech firms on average being more active on all forms of IP. Fourth, we do not find any significant difference in the use of IP strategies across firms at different points of their life cycle. Lastly, unlike age, firms of different size appear to manage IP significantly differently. On average, larger firms tend to engage much more extensively in the protection of IP, and this pattern cannot be easily explained by differences in the type of R&D or innovation produced by a firm. We also discuss the implications of these findings for innovation research and policy.View Full Paper PDF
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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
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Working PaperIMMIGRANT ENTREPRENEURS AND INNOVATION IN THE U.S. HIGH-TECH SECTOR
February 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-06
We estimate differences in innovation behavior between foreign versus U.S.-born entrepreneurs in high-tech industries. Our data come from the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs, a random sample of firms with detailed information on owner characteristics and innovation activities. We find uniformly higher rates of innovation in immigrant-owned firms for 15 of 16 different innovation measures; the only exception is for copyright/trademark. The immigrant advantage holds for older firms as well as for recent start-ups and for every level of the entrepreneur's education. The size of the estimated immigrant-native differences in product and process innovation activities rises with detailed controls for demographic and human capital characteristics but falls for R&D and patenting. Controlling for finance, motivations, and industry reduces all coefficients, but for most measures and specifications immigrants are estimated to have a sizable advantage in innovation.View Full Paper PDF
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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
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Working PaperBusiness Dynamics of Innovating Firms: Linking U.S. Patents with Administrative Data on Workers and Firms
July 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-19
This paper discusses the construction of a new longitudinal database tracking inventors and patent-owning firms over time. We match granted patents between 2000 and 2011 to administrative databases of firms and workers housed at the U.S. Census Bureau. We use inventor information in addition to the patent assignee firm name to and improve on previous efforts linking patents to firms. The triangulated database allows us to maximize match rates and provide validation for a large fraction of matches. In this paper, we describe the construction of the database and explore basic features of the data. We find patenting firms, particularly young patenting firms, disproportionally contribute jobs to the U.S. economy. We find patenting is a relatively rare event among small firms but that most patenting firms are nevertheless small, and that patenting is not as rare an event for the youngest firms compared to the oldest firms. While manufacturing firms are more likely to patent than firms in other sectors, we find most patenting firms are in the services and wholesale sectors. These new data are a product of collaboration within the U.S. Department of Commerce, between the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Location of Industrial Innovation: Does Manufacturing Matter?
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-09
What explains the location of industrial innovation? Economists have traditionally attempted to answer this question by studying firm-external knowledge spillovers. This paper shows that firm-internal linkages between production and R&D play an equally important role. I estimate an R&D location choice model that predicts patents by a firm in a location from R&D productivity and costs. Focusing on large R&D-performing firms in the chemical industry, an average-sized plant raises the firm's R&D productivity in the metropolitan area by about 2.5 times. The elasticity of R&D productivity with respect to the firm's production workers is almost as large as the elasticity with respect to total patents in the MSA, while proximity to academic R&D has no significant effect on R&D productivity in this sample. Other manufacturing industries exhibit similar results. My results cast doubt on the frequently-held view that a country can divest itself of manufacturing and specialize in innovation alone.View Full Paper PDF
