Mapping Firms' Locations in Technological Space: A Topological Analysis of Patent Statistics

Emerson G. Escolar, Yasuaki Hiraoka, Mitsuru Igami and Yasin Ozcan

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Where do firms innovate? Mapping their locations and directions in technological space is challenging due to its high dimensionality. We propose a new method to characterize firms' inventive activities via topological data analysis (TDA) that represents high-dimensional data in a shape graph. Applying this method to 333 major firms' patents in 1976--2005 reveals substantial heterogeneity: some firms remain undifferentiated; others develop unique portfolios. Firms with unique trajectories, which we define and measure graph-theoretically as "flares" in the Mapper graph, perform better. This association is statistically and economically significant, and continues to hold after we control for portfolio size, firm survivorship, industry classification, and firm fixed effects. By contrast, existing techniques -- such as principal component analysis (PCA) and Jaffe's (1989) clustering method -- struggle to track these firm-level dynamics.

Date: 2019-08, Revised 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp, nep-ipr and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.00257 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:1909.00257

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().