We describe the construction of a panel data set from the U.S. patent data that contains measures of inventors' life-cycle R&D productivity--patents and patent citations. We match the data set to information on the U.S. pharmaceutical and semiconductor firms for whom they work. In this paper we...

We use U.S. patent records to examine the role of research personnel as a pathway for the diffusion of ideas from university to industry. Appearing on a patent assigned to a university is evidence that an inventor has been exposed to university research, either directly as a university...

Protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) serves a dual role in economic development. While it promotes innovation by providing legal protection of inventions, it may retard catch-up and learning by restricting the diffusion of innovations. Does stronger IPR protection in a developing...

We decompose the recent patent increase into components representing (1) an increase in resources made available to research and development, (2) an across-the-board rise in the patent yield of an R&D dollar, and (3) changes in the patent yield in individual industries. Two high tech fields,...

This Paper studies the provision of incentives in a large US training organization, which is divided into about 50 independent pools of training agencies. The number and the size of the agencies within each pool vary greatly. Each pool distributes performance incentive awards to the training...

This Paper studies a particular kind of gaming response to explicit incentives in a large government organization. The gaming responses we consider occur when agents strategically report their performance outcomes to maximize their awards. An important contribution of this work is to examine...

Using data from a large, U.S. federal job training program, we investigate whether enrolment incentives that exogenously vary the ‘shadow prices’ for serving different demographic subgroups of clients influence case workers’ intake decisions. We show that case workers enroll more clients...