Search Results
Journal Article
Knowledge spillovers: cities' role in the new economy.
Jerry Carlino points out that cities, no longer centers of manufacturing, now serve as centers of creativity and innovation. The resulting ?knowledge spillovers? are important components of today's economic growth.
Conference Paper
The influence of university research on industrial innovation
Gerald Marschke examined university and industrial patents and found evidence of two trends that suggest a growing link between university research and industrial innovation. First, the flow of university researchers to private sector firms is growing. Second, industrial innovators are using more university-created knowledge in their products.
Working Paper
Prizes and patents: using market signals to provide incentives for innovations
Innovative activities have public good characteristics in the sense that the cost of producing the innovation is high compared to the cost of producing subsequent units. Moreover, knowledge of how to produce subsequent units is widely known once the innovation has occurred and is, therefore, non-rivalrous. The main question of this paper is whether mechanisms can be found which exploit market information to provide appropriate incentives for innovation. The ability of the mechanism designer to exploit such information depends crucially on the ability of the innovator to manipulate market ...
Journal Article
The uninvited guest: patents on Wall Street
For at least the past twenty-five years, financial services industries have been creating innovative products and services without the help of patents. The 1998 State Street Bank case changed all this, making patents freely available in these industries. Will patents help or hurt financial services innovation in the long run? This article sheds some light on this issue. ; Before the advent of patents, several ?appropriability? mechanisms protected financial services innovation: ?first mover? advantages, complementary or ?cospecific? assets, and trade secrecy. Evidence suggests that, in the ...
Journal Article
Patent reform: a mixed blessing for the U.S. economy?
The 1980s represented a period of dramatic change in the design and enforcement of U.S. intellectual property law. Many of these changes were adopted in the hopes of stimulating private research and development and improving the technological competitiveness of American industries. This article examines the effects of an especially important aspect of these changes: many more inventions qualify for patent protection than before. While it seems logical that making patents easier to obtain will encourage more inventive activity, economic analysis reveals this is not always true, and it is less ...
Working Paper
Matching and learning in cities: urban density and the rate of invention
This paper examines the role local labor markets play in the production of innovations. The authors appeal to a labor market matching model ( la Berliant, Reed, and Wang 2004) to argue that in dense urban areas, workers are more selective in their matches and are therefore more productive. They find that, all else equal, patent intensity (patents per capita) is 20 percent higher in a metropolitan area with an employment density (jobs per square mile) twice that of another metropolitan area. Since local employment density doubles nearly four times across their sample, the implied gains in ...
Journal Article
Innovation: Is the Eighth District catching up with the nation?
The degree of innovation in the Eighth District has lagged the rest of the nation over the past two decades. In one area, however, the District is beginning to catch up.
Working Paper
Patent-Based News Shocks
We exploit firm-level data on patent grants and subsequent reactions of stocks to identify technological news shocks. Changes in stock market valuations due to announcements of individual patent grants represent expected future increases in the technology level, which we refer to as patent-based news shocks. Our patentbased news shocks resemble diffusion news, in that they do not affect total factor productivity in the short run but induce a strong permanent effect after five years. These shocks produce positive comovement between consumption, output, investment, and hours. Unlike the ...
Journal Article
Intellectual property protection in a globalizing era
Journal Article
The globalization of ideas
Globalization is the process of increasing economic interdependence among nations. It is reflected in the growth of cross-border trade in goods and services. Ideas, like goods and services, also flow across borders and their globalization is well under way. ; Quantifying that flow is difficult; however, patent filings can provide indirect evidence on the production of ideas. Further, cross-border patenting--the patenting of one idea in several countries--can help trace the flow of ideas. What we learn from those data is that idea production has taken off in the developing BRIC economies ...