Within the field of environmental economics, the role of technological change has received much attention. The long-term nature of many environmental problems, such as climate change, makes understanding the evolution of technology an important part of projecting future impacts. Moreover, in...

We explore the commercialization of government-generated technology by analyzing patents awarded to the U.S. government and the citations to those patents from subsequent patents. We use information on citations to federal patents in two ways: (1) to compare the average technological impact of...

We compare the geographic location of patent citations to those of the cited patents, as evidence of the extent to which knowledge spillovers are geographically localized. We find that citations to U.S. patents are more likely to come from the U.S., and more likely to come from the same state...

This paper describes the construction of a large panel data set covering about 2600 firms in the U.S. manufacturing sector for up to twenty years which contains annual data on financial variables, employment, research and development expenditures, and aggregate patent applications. This data set...

We explore the use of patent citations to measure the "basicness" and appropriability of inventions. We propose that the basicness of research underlying an invention can be characterized by the nature of the previous patents cited by an invention; that the basicness of research outcomes relates...

This paper explores changes in university patenting behavior between 1965 and 1988. We show that university patents have increased 15-fold while real university research spending almost tripled. The causes of this increase are unclear, but may include increased focus on commercially relevant...

This paper uses sales and patent distribution data to establish the market and technological "positions" of firms. A notion of technological proximity of firms is developed in order to quantify potential R&D spillovers. The importance of the position variables and the potential spilover pool in...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that a firm's R&D and the R&D of other firms increase conventional factor productivity. We investigate these phenomena further by examining the relationship between plant-level productivity and firm-level R&D. We find that (1) the productivity-enhancing...