Productivity and technological change.

PositionNational Bureau of Economic Research's Program on Productivity

On March 6, researchers in the NBER's Program on Productivity met at the Bureau's Cambridge office. Jean O. Lanjouw, NBER and Yale University, and Mark Schankerman, the London School of Economics, chose these topics for discussion:

Bronwyn H. Hall, NBER and University of California, Berkeley; Adam B. Jaffe, NBER and Brandeis University; and Manuel Trajtenberg, NBER and Tel Aviv University, "Market Value and Patent Citations: A First Look"

Mary Ellen Mogee, Mogee Research & Analysis Associates, "Patent Citations and Licensing Revenues"

Arvids Ziedonis, University of California, Berkeley, "Analyzing Academic Patent Licensing and Citation"

Discussant: Suzanne Scotchmer, NBER and University of California, Berkeley

Dietmar Harhoff, Wissenschraftszentrum Berlin; Frederic M. Scherer, Harvard University; and Katrin Vopel, Zentrum fur Europaische Wirtschaftsforschung, "Citations, Family Size, Opposition, and the Value of Patent Rights - Evidence from Germany"

Jean O. Lanjouw and Mark Schankerman, "Measuring Innovation: What Do We Gain from Multiple Indicators?"

Jonathan Putnam, Charles River Associates, "How Many Pennies for Your Quote? Estimates of the Value of Patent Citations"

Jean O. Lanjouw; Ariel Pakes, NBER and Yale University; and Jonathan Putnam, "A Report on a European Patents Project"

As patent data increasingly become available in machine-readable form, more researchers are using measures based on patents and their citations as indicators of technological output and information flow. Hall, Jaffe, and Trajtenberg explore the economic meaning of citation-based patent measures using the financial market valuation of the firms that own the patents. With a new comprehensive dataset containing more than 4,000 U. S. manufacturing firms and their patenting activity for the past 20 years, they analyze the contributions of R and D spending, patents, and citation-weighted patents to measures of Tobin's Q for the firms, attempting to learn what patent citations really measure and whether they can be used as proxies for economically significant innovative activity

Mogee investigates the relationship between patent licensing revenues and patent citations. She focuses on a sample of 49 patents that generated licensing revenues and 147 that did not. For each patent, there is data available on the annual number of citations from 1971-85. She finds that the number of citations is strongly associated with the probability that a patent will generate...

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