Market Demand, Technological Opportunity and Research Spillovers on R&D Intensity and Productivity Growth

This paper uses sales and patent distribution data to establish the market and technological "positions" of firms. A notion of technological proximity of firms is developed in order to quantify potential R&D spillovers. The importance of the position variables and the potential spilover pool in explaining R&D intensity, patent productivity and TFP growth is explored.I find that both technological and market positions are signifi-cant in explaining R&D intensity, and that the technological effects are significant in explaining patent productivity. I cannot distinguish between the two effects in explaining TFP growth. Spillovers are important in all three contexts. Firms in an area where there is a high level of research by other firms do more R&D themselves, they produce more patents per R&D dollar, and their productivity grows faster, even controlling for the increased R&D and patents. These effects are present controlling for both industry and technological position effects.

Technological Opportunity and Spillovers of R&D: Evidence from Firms' Patents, Profits and Market Value

This paper presents evidence that firms' patents, profits and market value are systematically related to the"technological position" of firms' research programs. Further, firms are seen to "move" in technology space in response to the pattern of contemporaneous profits at different positions. These movements tend to erode excess returns."Spillovers" of R&D are modelled by examining whether the R&D of neighboring firms in technology space has an observable impact on the firm's R&D success. Firms whose neighbors do much R&D produce more patents per dollar of their own R&D,with a positive interaction that gives high R&D firms the largest benefit from spillovers. In terms of profit and market value, however, their are both positive and negative effects of nearby firms' R&D. The net effect is positive for high R&D firms, but firms with R&D about one standard deviation below the mean are made worse off overall by the R&D of others.

Induction and Evolution in the Origin of Inventions: Evidence from Smoking Cessation Products

Neoclassical economic theory predicts that policies that discourage the consumption of a particular good will induce innovation in a socially desirable substitute. Evolutionary theory emphasizes the possibility of innovation waves associated with the identification of new dominant designs. We incorporate both of these possibilities in a model of the invention of new smoking cessation products, based on a new dataset of patents on such products from 1951-2004. We find that an increase in cigarette tax levels and smoking bans had no discernable impact on the industry-wide rate of invention in smoking cessation products. It does appear, however, that dominant designs did have substantial positive innovation effects. More specifically, the introduction of the nicotine gum and patch are estimated to have increased the rate of patenting activity in smoking cessation products by 60 and 79 percent, respectively, subject to a 10 percent rate of decay. Finally, these products had larger innovation effects at the firm level than among individual inventors.Patents, Technological Change, Smoking Cessation Products, Cigarette Taxes

Flows of Knowledge from Universities and Federal Labs: Modeling the Flowof Patent Citations Over Time and Across Institutional and Geographic Boundari

The extent to which new technological knowledge flows across institutional and national boundaries is a question of great importance for public policy and the modeling of economic growth. This paper develops a model of the process generating subsequent citations to patents as a lens for viewing knowledge diffusion. We find that the probability of patent citation over time after a patent is granted fits well to a double-exponential function that can be interpreted as the mixture of diffusion and obsolescence functions. The results indicate that diffusion is geographically localized. Controlling for other factors, within-country citations are more numerous and come more quickly than those that cross country boundaries.

A Tale of Two Market Failures: Technology and Environmental Policy

Market failures associated with environmental pollution interact with market failures associated with the innovation and diffusion of new technologies. These combined market failures provide a strong rationale for a portfolio of public policies that foster emissions reduction as well as the development and adoption of environmentally beneficial technology. Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that the rate and direction of technological advance is influenced by market and regulatory incentives, and can be cost-effectively harnessed through the use of economicincentive based policy. In the presence of weak or nonexistent environmental policies, investments in the development and diffusion of new environmentally beneficial technologies are very likely to be less than would be socially desirable. Positive knowledge and adoption spillovers and information problems can further weaken innovation incentives. While environmental technology policy is fraught with difficulties, a long-term view suggests a strategy of experimenting with policy approaches and systematically evaluating their success.technology, research and development, environment, externality, policy

Ivory Tower Versus Corporate Lab: An Empirical Study of Basic Research and Appropriability

We explore the use of patent citations to measure the "basicness" and appropriability of inventions. We propose that the basicness of research underlying an invention can be characterized by the nature of the previous patents cited by an invention; that the basicness of research outcomes relates to the subsequent patents that cite an invention; and that the fraction of citing patents that are assigned to the same organization as the original invention is a measure of appropriabiity. We test the validity of these presumptions by comparing the value of our measures for university and corporate patents, and find that many of the measures do conform to our a priori belief that university research and research outcomes are more basic and harder to appropriate than those of corporations. We also find some evidence that basicness of outcomes is correlated with basicness of research, and that appropriability is lower for basic outcomes.

Patent Citations and International Knowledge Flow: The Cases of Korea and Taiwan

This paper examines patterns of knowledge diffusion from US and Japan to Korea and Taiwan using patent citations as an indicator of knowledge flow. We estimate a knowledge diffusion model using a data set of all patents granted in the U.S. to inventors residing in these four countries. Explicitly modeling the roles of technology proximity and knowledge decay and knowledge diffusion over time, we have found that knowledge diffusion from US and Japan to Korea and Taiwan exhibits quite different patterns. It is much more likely for Korean patents to cite Japanese patents than US patents, whereas Taiwanese inventors tend to learn evenly from both US and Japanese inventors. The frequency of a Korean patent citing a Japanese patent is almost twice that of the frequency of a Taiwanese patent citing a Japanese patent. We also find that a patent is much more likely to cite a patent from its own technological field than from another field.

Science and innovation policy for New Zealand

The ‘Science of Science Policy’ is an interdisciplinary field of scholarly study that seeks to model, measure, and evaluate the interaction of public policies (including funding) and the performance of the science and innovation system. Such study offers insights and findings that can increase the effectiveness of science and innovation policy for New Zealand. New Zealand’s rate of public investment in research is only about two-thirds, and that of business investment in research about one-third of the OECD average. Our low business R&D intensity is not unexpected given our market size, firm size, and industrial composition. Nevertheless, public policy should aim to mitigate barriers to firms’ ability to undertake high-return research investments. As we undertake only 0.2% of the world’s research, most of the knowledge used in New Zealand is created elsewhere, so positioning ourselves to derive maximum benefit from others’ research is likely to have high payoff. The spillover phenomenon should be considered in making decisions about public research support. A re-balancing from competition towards cooperation, and encouraging linkages between research entities and organisations with a commercial orientation will increase the likelihood of spillover benefits. Research output could be increased relatively quickly by increasing the currently low expenditure per researcher, but any sustained increase will require more skilled scientists and engineers. Therefore public financing of research should include a monitored programme of training grants, and immigration policy settings that do not inhibit attracting skilled scientists and engineers. Attraction and retention of research ‘stars’ should be an explicit objective of New Zealand science policy. A culture of innovation requires an attitude that defines success in terms of the global market, not the local market. It requires a social, economic and cultural environment that rewards risktaking and does not see failure as a barrier to undertaking further investment. Policy makers, too, should be willing to take risks, and systemati

Technological Change and the Environment

Environmental policy discussions increasingly focus on issues related to technological change. This is partly because the environmental consequences of social activity are frequently affected by the rate and direction of technological change, and partly because environmental policy interventions can themselves create constraints and incentives that have significant effects on the path of technological progress. This paper, prepared as a chapter draft for the forthcoming Handbook of Environmental Economics (North-Holland/Elsevier Science), summarizes for environmental economists current thinking on technological change in the broader economics literature, surveys the growing economic literature on the interaction between technology and the environment, and explores the normative implications of these analyses. We begin with a brief overview of the economics of technological change, and then examine three important areas where technology and the environment intersect: the theory and empirical evidence of induced innovation and the related literature on the effects of environmental policy on the creation of new, environmentally friendly technology; the theory and empirics of environmental issues related to technology diffusion; and analyses of the comparative technological impacts of alternative environmental policy instruments. We conclude with suggestions for further research on technological change and the environment.technological change, induced innovation, environment, policy