EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Inter-technology knowledge spillovers for energy technologies

Gregory Nemet

Energy Economics, 2012, vol. 34, issue 5, 1259-1270

Abstract: Both anecdotal evidence and the innovation literature indicate that important advances in energy technology have made use of knowledge originating in other technological areas. This study uses the set of U.S. patents granted from 1976 to 2006 to assess the role of knowledge acquired from outside each energy patent's technological classification. It identifies the effect of external knowledge on the forward citation frequency of energy patents. The results support the claim above. Regression coefficients on citations to external prior art are positive and significant. Further, the effect of external citations is significantly larger than that of other types of citations. Conversely, citations to prior art that is technologically near have a negative effect on forward citation frequency. These results are robust across several alternative specifications and definitions of whether each flow of knowledge is external. Important energy patents have drawn heavily from external prior art categorized as chemical, electronics, and electrical; they cite very little prior art from computers, communications, and medical inventions.

Keywords: Innovation; Patents; Spillovers; Knowledge flows (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O39 Q42 Q48 Q55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (65)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988312001077
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:34:y:2012:i:5:p:1259-1270

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2012.06.002

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2024-10-17
Handle: RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:34:y:2012:i:5:p:1259-1270