What Happens When Firms Patent? New Evidence from U.S. Economic Census Data

Natarajan Balasubramanian and Jagadeesh Sivadasan

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2011, vol. 93, issue 1, 126-146

Abstract: We build a new concordance between the NBER Patent Data and U.S. Census microdata and use it to examine what happens when firms patent. We find strong evidence that increases in patent stock are associated with increases in firm size, scope, and skill and capital intensity. We find somewhat weaker evidence that changes in patenting are positively correlated with changes in total factor productivity. We also analyze first-time patentees and find similar effects following initial patent application. Together, these results suggest that patenting is indeed associated with real changes within firms, in particular with growth through increases in scope. © 2011 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (131)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00058 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: What Happens When Firms Patent? New Evidence from U.S. Economic Census Data (2008)
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:tpr:restat:v:93:y:2011:i:1:p:126-146

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().