Research

Abstract. We use the universe of US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) data on patents and inventors from 1976 to 2017 to look at how inventors’ potential concern for business-stealing affects coauthorship on patents. First, we find an inverted-U shape in the fraction of coauthors that an inventor has per year who are new as a function number of other inventors also working in an inventor's field. Second, we find that after a breakthrough invention, an inventor brings in persistently fewer than usual new coauthors. Third, a higher potential concern for business stealing—as measured either by the number of others working or the average price markups by firms in the area—leads to a higher drop in the fraction of new co-authors per patent after a breakthrough. We show how these patterns can be explained via a simple model in which inventors trade off gains from collaboration against threats of business stealing.

Abstract. Do markets price knowledge spillovers? We show that patent grants influence the stock returns of firms that are connected through technological knowledge dependencies. Using directed patent citations among publicly listed companies in the United States, we construct a granular measure of each firm's exposure to new patents granted to its technologically upstream firms. Patents granted to these upstream companies significantly boost its abnormal stock returns during the week of the grant. We find that these financial spillovers are predominantly localized within a firm's immediate technological connections. Additionally, we provide a novel empirical decomposition of financial spillovers generated from patent grants, by distinguishing those spillovers emerging from sources of technological knowledge, from those emerging from product market rivals (negative effect) and suppliers (positive effect). Our findings are robust to alternative specifications and placebo tests, and they suggest that technological knowledge spillovers create important market-priced ties between firms that are not fully captured by traditional product market relationships.

Abstract. We examine the impact of the surge in Chinese patenting in the US on the specialization and quality of innovation produced by US firms. Using the rise in Chinese patents filed in the USPTO since the 2000s across various technologies, and leveraging the variation in firms' exposure to these technologies through a shift-share IV design, we demonstrate that the firms most affected by Chinese competition experience an increase in their R&D specialization through a reduction in the number of R&D lines of firms, the scope of patents and the originality of their innovations. We further document that exposure to foreign competition is also associated with a decline in broad measures of patent quality, despite an increase in the number of patents filed by the affected firms. We suggest that these results are consistent with a basic model where firms trade-off research effort on originality with producing more specialized and incremental innovations. Our findings shed light on new potential explanations behind the documented growth in specialization and decline in R&D quality in recent decades.