TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hall,Bronwyn H.
AU  - Trajtenberg,Manuel
TI  - Uncovering GPTS with Patent Data
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10901
PY  - 2004
Y2  - November 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10901
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10901.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Bronwyn H. Hall
Dept. of Economics
549 Evans Hall
UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
Tel: 510/642-3878
Fax: 510/548-5561
E-Mail: bhhall@nber.org

Manuel Trajtenberg
Eitan Berglas School of Economics
Tel-Aviv University
Tel-Aviv 69978
ISRAEL
Tel: 972-3-640-9911
Fax: 972-3-640-9908
E-Mail: manuel@post.tau.ac.il
AB  - This paper asks the question: Can we see evidence of General Purpose Technologies in patent data? Using data on three million US patents granted between 1967 and 1999, and their citations received between 1975 and 2002, we construct a number of measures of GPTs, including generality, number of citations, and patent class growth, for patents themselves and for the patents that cite the patents. A selection of the top twenty patents in the tails of the distribution of several of these measures yields a set of mostly ICT technologies, of which the most important are those underlying  transactions on the internet and object-oriented software. We conclude with a brief discussion of the problems we encountered in developing our measures and suggestions for future work in this area.
ER  -