British-French technology transfer from the Revolution to Louis Philippe (1791-1844): evidence from patent data

Alessandro Nuvolari, Gaspare Tortorici and Michelangelo Vasta

No 15620, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper examines the patterns of technology transfer from Britain to France during the early phases of industrialization; it does so by making use of a dataset comprising all patents granted in France during the period 1791-1844. Exploiting the peculiarities of the French legislation, we construct an array of patent quality indicators and econometrically investigate their determinants. We find that patents filed by British inventors or French inventors personally linked with British ones were of relatively higher quality. Overall, our results show that the French innovation system was effectively capable of attracting and absorbing key technologies from Britain.

Keywords: Technology transfer; Patents; Industrial revolution; France; Britain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N73 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-his and nep-ino
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15620 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: British-French Technology Transfer from the Revolution to Louis Philippe (1791–1844): Evidence from Patent Data (2023)
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:cpr:ceprdp:15620

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15620

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().