TY  - JOUR
AU  - Griliches,Zvi
AU  - Pakes,Ariel
AU  - Hall,Bronwyn H.
TI  - The Value of Patents as Indicators of Inventive Activity
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 2083
PY  - 1988
Y2  - September 1988
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2083
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2083.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Zvi Griliches
E-Mail: N/A user is deceased

Ariel Pakes
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Room 117
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-5320
Fax: 617/496-7352
E-Mail: apakes@fas.harvard.edu

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
AB  - This paper summarizes a number of studies which use patent data to examine different aspects of technological change. It describes our firm level data set construction effort; reports on the relationship between RLD expenditures and the level of patenting; analyzes the relationship between patents, R&D, and tire stock market value of firms; reports on the estimation of the value of patent rights based on European patent renewal data; and describes the use of patent data to estimate the importance of R&D spillovers. It concludes that patent data represent a valuable resource for the analysis of technological change. They can be used to study longer-run interfirm differences in inventive activity and as a substitute for R&D data where they are not available in the desired detail. It is possible also to use a firm's distribution of patenting by field to infer its position in "technological space" and use it in turn to study how R&D spills over from one firm to another. Moreover, patent renewal data, which are also becoming available in the U.S., allow one to construct more relevant "quality weighted" inventive "output" measures .
ER  -