Issues in measuring the degree of technological specialisation with patent data

Nicolas van Zeebroeck (), Bruno van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie and Wook Han
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Wook Han: ULB Solvay Business School.

No 05-016.RS, Working Papers CEB from Université Libre de Bruxelles, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Centre Emile Bernheim (CEB)

Abstract: This paper analyses several issues that arise when measuring technological specialisation with patent data. Three starting choices are required regarding the data source, the statistical measure and the sectoral aggregation level. We show that the measure is highly sensitive to the data source and to the level of sectoral aggregation. The statistical analysis further suggests that the most stable and reliable measures of technological specialization are obtained with patents applied at the EPO, with Gini or C20 as statistical measure and the 4-digits aggregation level of the IPC classification system.

Keywords: Technological specialisation; patent data; patents statistics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L16 O3 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ino and nep-tid
Date: 2005-04
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http://www.solvay.edu/EN/Research/Bernheim/documents/wp05016.pdf First version, 2005 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sol:wpaper:05-016

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