The Sources and Effects of Knowledge Spillovers

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9320973 Jaffe Knowledge spillovers are key to understanding the process of technological progress, how it contributes to economic growth, and how policy levers can be used effectively to foster growth through innovation. Knowledge spillovers are created when universities and government labs produce the basic research results that provide the foundation for applied research in the private sector; they are also created in the private sector, when researchers take advantage of knowledge produced by other private agents. Yet, despite this importance and a decade of research, crucial questions remain unanswered. For example, we do not know the relative importance of different institutions, different industries and different geographic regions in generating spillovers; the extent to which spillovers are contained within local or national boundaries; whether and how firms vary in their ability to use spillovers from others; and how the public knowledge flows that spillovers represent have varied over time. The contribution of this project comes from assembling a comprehensive database on patents, validating the use of patent citations as evidence of knowledge flows through the detailed examination of other evidence, and using the datasets to address these unanswered questions. More specifically, the project constructs a comprehensive database on all patents granted between 1975 and 1993 and all citations made by those patents, including references to earlier patents going back to 1871. The citations database is used to map the flows of knowledge across time and among sectors, geographic regions, and different institutions such as firms, universities and government labs, and to measure the "basicness" and appropriability of particular inventions or the portfolio of inventions held by particular firms, sectors or regions. The database will be merged with the NBER R&D Panel dataset, which contains annual financial and market value information on over 2000 firms. It will also be merged with the Census LRD data on production by establishment, and the Census-NSF industrial R&D survey data. These datasets will be used to explore a number of important questions at the heart of the economics of technological change and crucial to technology policy.