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A Tale of Two Fields? STEM Career Outcomes
October 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-53
Is the labor market for US researchers experiencing the best or worst of times? This paper analyzes the market for recently minted Ph.D. recipients using supply-and-demand logic and data linking graduate students to their dissertations and W2 tax records. We also construct a new dissertation-industry 'relevance' measure, comparing dissertation and patent text and linking patents to assignee firms and industries. We find large disparities across research fields in placement (faculty, postdoc, and industry positions), earnings, and the use of specialized human capital. Thus, it appears to simultaneously be a good time for some fields and a bad time for others.
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Patents, 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.
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Research and/or Development? Financial Frictions and Innovation Investment
August 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-39
U.S. firms have reduced their investment in scientific research ('R') compared to product development ('D'), raising questions about the returns to each type of investment, and about the reasons for this shift. We use Census data that disaggregates 'R' from 'D' to study how US firms adjust their innovation investments in response to an external increase in funding cost. Companies with greater demand for refinancing during the 2008 financial crisis, made larger cuts to R&D investment. This reduction in R&D is achieved almost entirely by reducing investment in research. Development remains essentially unchanged. If other firms patenting similar technologies must refinance, however, then Development investment declines. We interpret the latter result as evidence of technological competition: firms are reluctant to cut Development expenditures when that could place them at a disadvantage compared to potential rivals.
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Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone?
Employment Dynamics of US Inventors
April 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-17
How are inventors allocated in the US economy and does that allocation affect innovative capacity? To answer these questions, we first build a model where an inventor with a new idea has the possibility to work for an entrant or incumbent firm. Strategic considerations encourage the incumbent to hire the inventor, offering higher wages, and then not implement her idea. We then combine data on 760 thousand U.S. inventors with the LEHD data. We find that when an inventor is hired by an incumbent, their earnings increases by 12.6 percent and their innovative output declines by 6 to 11 percent.
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On The Role of Trademarks: From Micro Evidence to Macro Outcomes
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-16R
What are the effects of trademarks on the U.S. economy? Evidence from comprehensive micro data on trademark registrations and outcomes for U.S. employer firms suggests that trademarks protect firm value and are linked to higher firm growth and marketing activity. Motivated by this evidence, trademarks are introduced in a general equilibrium framework to quantify their aggregate effects. Firms invest in product quality and engage in both informative and persuasive advertising to build a customer base subject to depreciation. Persuasive advertising induces a perception of higher quality. Firms can register trademarks to reduce customer depreciation and enhance product awareness. The model's predictions about trademark registrations, firm growth, and advertising expenditures align with the empirical evidence. The analysis shows that, compared to the counterfactual economy without trademarks, the U.S. economy with trademarks generates higher average product quality but lower variety, ultimately resulting in greater welfare and higher industry concentration. While informative advertising improves welfare, persuasive advertising reduces it. Nevertheless, the positive welfare impact of trademarks outweighs the negative effects of persuasive advertising.
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Measuring the Characteristics and Employment Dynamics of U.S. Inventors
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-43
Innovation is a key driver of long run economic growth. Studying innovation requires a clear view of the characteristics and behavior of the individuals that create new ideas. A general lack of rich, large-scale data has constrained such analyses. We address this by introducing a new dataset linking patent inventors to survey, census, and administrative microdata at the U.S. Census Bureau. We use this data to provide a first look at the demographic characteristics, employer characteristics, earnings, and employment dynamics of inventors. These linkages, which will be available to researchers with approved access, dramatically increases the scope of what can be learned about inventors and innovative activity.
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Improving 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.
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Innovation 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.
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The Color of Money: Federal vs. Industry Funding of University Research
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-26
U.S. universities, which are important producers of new knowledge, have experienced a shift in research funding away from federal and towards private industry sources. This paper compares the effects of federal and private university research funding, using data from 22 universities that include individual-level payments for everyone employed on all grants for each university year and that are linked to patent and Census data, including IRS W-2 records. We instrument for an individual's source of funding with government-wide R&D expenditure shocks within a narrow field of study. We find that a higher share of federal funding causes fewer but more general patents, more high-tech entrepreneurship, a higher likelihood of remaining employed in academia, and a lower likelihood of joining an incumbent firm. Increasing the private share of funding has opposite effects for most outcomes. It appears that private funding leads to greater appropriation of intellectual property by incumbent firms.
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R&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.
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