An official website of the United States government
Abstract This article analyzes how patent-induced shocks to labor productivity propagate into worker compensation using a new linkage of U.S. patent applications to U.S. business and worker tax records. We infer the causal effects of patent allowances by comparing firms whose patent applications were initially allowed to those whose patent applications were initially rejected. To identify patents that are ex ante valuable, we extrapolate the excess stock return estimates of Kogan et al. (2017) to the full set of accepted and rejected patent applications based on predetermined firm and patent application characteristics. An initial allowance of an ex ante valuable patent generates substantial increases in firm productivity and worker compensation. By contrast, initial allowances of lower ex ante value patents yield no detectable effects on firm outcomes. Patent allowances lead firms to increase employment, but entry wages and workforce composition are insensitive to patent decisions. On average, workers capture roughly 30 cents of every dollar of patent-induced surplus in higher earnings. This share is roughly twice as high among workers present since the year of application. These earnings effects are concentrated among men and workers in the top half of the earnings distribution and are paired with corresponding improvements in worker retention among these groups. We interpret these earnings responses as reflecting the capture of economic rents by senior workers, who are most costly for innovative firms to replace.
more »
« less
Reliance on science: Worldwide front‐page patent citations to scientific articles
Abstract <italic>Research summary</italic>To what extent do firms rely on basic science in their R&D efforts? Several scholars have sought to answer this and related questions, but progress has been impeded by the difficulty of matching unstructured references in patents to published papers. We introduce an open‐access dataset of references from the front pages of patents granted worldwide to scientific papers published since 1800. Each patent‐paper linkage is assigned a confidence score, which is characterized in a random sample by false negatives versus false positives. All matches are available for download athttp://relianceonscience.org. We outline several avenues for strategy research enabled by these new data. <italic>Managerial summary</italic>To what extent do firms rely on basic science in their R&D efforts? Several scholars have sought to answer this and related questions, but progress has been impeded by the difficulty of matching unstructured references in patents to published papers. We introduce an open‐access dataset of references from the front pages of patents granted worldwide to scientific papers published since 1800. Each patent‐paper linkage is assigned a confidence score, and we check a random sample of these confidence scores by hand in order to estimate both coverage (i.e., of the matches we should have found, what percentage did we find) and accuracy (i.e., of the matches we found, what percentage are correct). We outline several avenues for strategy research enabled by these new data.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1735669
- PAR ID:
- 10145028
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Strategic Management Journal
- Volume:
- 41
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 0143-2095
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1572-1594
- Size(s):
- p. 1572-1594
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Patents are key strategic resources which enable firms to appropriate innovation returns and prevent rival imitation. Patent examiners – individuals who may be subject to various sources of bias – play a central role in determining which inventions are awarded patent rights. Using a novel dataset, we explore if one increasingly prevalent source of bias – political ideology – manifests in examiner decision-making. Reassuringly, our analysis suggests that the political ideology of patent examiners is largely unrelated to patent office outcomes. However, we do find evidence suggesting politically active conservative-leaning examiners are more likely to grant patents relative to politically active liberal-leaning examiners, but only for patent applications where there is ambiguity regarding what constitutes patentable subject matter and hence examiners have greater discretion.more » « less
-
The United States (US) and the People’s Republic of China (China) have the most patents in nanotechnology in their own depositories and overall in the international depositories. This paper compares nanotechnology landscapes between 2001 and 2017 as reflected in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA). It presents the evolution of nanotechnology patent development in the US and China, the differences between nanotechnology topics addressed in the USPTO and CNIPA patents, key players in nanotechnology fields in both domestic and foreign markets, and the player collaboration patterns. Bibliographic, content, and social network analyses are used. The longitudinal changes of granted patents and ranked countries, patent families, technology fields, and key players in domestic and overseas markets are outlined. Collaboration networks of assignees and the influential players have been identified based on network parameters. Results show that the US market attracts more international collaborations and has a higher level of knowledge exchange and resource sharing than the Chinese market. Companies play a vital role with regard to US nanotechnology development, resulting in more within-industry collaborations. In contrast, universities and research institutes are the dominant contributors to China’s nanotechnology development, leading to more academia-industry collaborations in China’s market.more » « less
-
The 2023 update to the Artificial Intelligence Patent Dataset (AIPD) extends the original AIPD to all United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent documents (i.e., patents and pre-grant publications, or PGPubs) published through 2023, while incorporating an improved patent landscaping methodology to identify AI within patents and PGPubs. This new approach substitutes BERT for Patents for the Word2Vec embeddings used previously, and uses active learning to incorporate additional training data closer to the “decision boundary” between AI and not-AI to help improve predictions. We show that this new approach achieves substantially better performance than the original methodology on a set of patent documents where the two methods disagreed—on this set, the AIPD 2023 achieved precision of 68.18 percent and recall of 78.95 percent, while the original AIPD achieved 50 percent and 21.05 percent, respectively. To help researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers better understand the determinants and impacts of AI invention, we have made the AIPD 2023 publicly available on the USPTO’s economic research web page.more » « less
-
A Gram-stain-negative, rod-shaped bacterial strain, designatedVibrio floridensisIRLE0018 (=NRRL B-65642=NCTC 14661), was isolated from a cyanobacterial bloom along the Indian River Lagoon (IRL), a large and highly biodiverse estuary in eastern Florida (USA). The results of phylogenetic, biochemical, and phenotypic analyses indicate that this isolate is distinct from species of the genusVibriowith validly published names and is the closest relative to the emergent human pathogen,Vibrio vulnificus. Here, we present the complete genome sequence ofV. floridensisstrain IRLE0018 (4 535 135 bp). On the basis of the established average nucleotide identity (ANI) values for the determination of different species (ANI <95 %), strain IRLE0018, with an ANI of approximately 92 % compared with its closest relative,V. vulnificus, represents a novel species within the genusVibrio. To our knowledge, this represents the first time this species has been described. The results of genomic analyses ofV. floridensisIRLE0018 indicate the presence of antibiotic resistance genes and several known virulence factors, however, its pathogenicity profile (e.g. survival in serum, phagocytosis avoidance) reveals limited virulence potential of this species in contrast toV. vulnificus.more » « less
