We study the post-World War II "Golden Age" of American corporate research from 1945 to 1980, using multiple indicators of corporate research activity. We use an ensemble learning approach to classify firms as either Science Leaders, Absorbers or Followers. Our analysis reveals that only a small...

This paper uses a large language model to develop an ex-ante measure of the commercial potential of scientific findings. In addition to validating the measure against the typical holdout sample, we validate it externally against 1.) the progression of scientific findings through a major...

There is a growing literature that aims at assessing the private value of knowledge assets and patents. It has been shown that patents and their quality as measured by citations received by future patents contribute significantly to the market value of firms beyond their R&D stocks. This paper...

The question of protecting intellectual property rights by academic inventors was never seriously contemplated until the introduction of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 in the US. The Act allowed universities to retain patent rights over inventions arising out of federally-funded research and to...

Regulatory reform efforts in a broad range of industries have resulted in increased importance of competitive forces as a means to allocate resources and improve economic efficiency. A number of indicators suggest that such forces have been stronger in the United States than in most other OECD...

It is widely known that demand-pull policies in the United States, especially the federal investment tax credits (ITC) and the California Solar Initiative (CSI), have led to a rapid escalation in the installation of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. But there has been little systematic study into...

Since the 1980s, the US has experienced a surge in patenting and R&D. To better understand the phenomena, we explore the evolution of the market value of knowledge capital with a novel firm-level dataset. While the importance of R&D has steadily declined, the market value of patents made a large...