Flows of Knowledge from Universities and Federal Labs: Modeling the Flowof Patent Citations Over Time and Across Institutional and Geographic BoundariAdam B. Jaffe, Manuel Trajtenberg
NBER Working Paper No. 5712 The extent to which new technological knowledge flows across institutional and national boundaries is a question of great importance for public policy and the modeling of economic growth. This paper develops a model of the process generating subsequent citations to patents as a lens for viewing knowledge diffusion. We find that the probability of patent citation over time after a patent is granted fits well to a double-exponential function that can be interpreted as the mixture of diffusion and obsolescence functions. The results indicate that diffusion is geographically localized. Controlling for other factors, within-country citations are more numerous and come more quickly than those that cross country boundaries.
Published: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol.93, pp.12671-12677, November 1996. This paper is available as PDF (1171 K) or via email.
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