In this study, we present novel statistics on the patenting in US manufacturing and new evidence on the question of what happens when firms patent. We do so by creating a comprehensive firm-patent matched dataset that links the NBER patent data (covering the universe of patents) to firm data...

We propose an industry-level index of capital liquidity -- defined as the share of used capital in aggregate industry capital expenditure -- that relates (inversely) to sunkenness of capital investment. We then test the effect of capital liquidity on the dispersion and mean of industry...