Attention has increasingly been shifted towards the long-run perspective on technological innovation, which suggests that progress comes in waves, each one originated by a major breakthrough or general purpose technology (GPT). This paper seeks to assess whether nanotechnology is likely to...

The use of patent citations as a measure of patent "quality" increased dramatically in recent years. In this note, I use hazard estimation to explore the dynamics of patent citation. I find evidence of unobserved heterogeneity and a means to separate patent quality from citation "inflation."

Many studies rely on patent citations to measure intellectual heritage and impact. In this article, we show that the nature of patent citations has changed dramatically in recent years. Today, a small minority of patent applications are generating a large majority of patent citations, and the...

This article describes the “USPTO Patent Examination Research Dataset” (PatEx), and explores possible selection issues and the representativeness of the 9.1 million US patent application records it contains. We find that data are sparse for years before 1981, and that serious selection...