Technological Opportunity and Spillovers of R&D: Evidence from Firms' Patents, Profits and Market Value

This paper presents evidence that firms' patents, profits and market value are systematically related to the"technological position" of firms' research programs. Further, firms are seen to "move" in technology space in response to the pattern of contemporaneous profits at different positions. These movements tend to erode excess returns."Spillovers" of R&D are modelled by examining whether the R&D of neighboring firms in technology space has an observable impact on the firm's R&D success. Firms whose neighbors do much R&D produce more patents per dollar of their own R&D,with a positive interaction that gives high R&D firms the largest benefit from spillovers. In terms of profit and market value, however, their are both positive and negative effects of nearby firms' R&D. The net effect is positive for high R&D firms, but firms with R&D about one standard deviation below the mean are made worse off overall by the R&D of others.

Market Demand, Technological Opportunity and Research Spillovers on R&D Intensity and Productivity Growth

This paper uses sales and patent distribution data to establish the market and technological "positions" of firms. A notion of technological proximity of firms is developed in order to quantify potential R&D spillovers. The importance of the position variables and the potential spilover pool in explaining R&D intensity, patent productivity and TFP growth is explored.I find that both technological and market positions are signifi-cant in explaining R&D intensity, and that the technological effects are significant in explaining patent productivity. I cannot distinguish between the two effects in explaining TFP growth. Spillovers are important in all three contexts. Firms in an area where there is a high level of research by other firms do more R&D themselves, they produce more patents per R&D dollar, and their productivity grows faster, even controlling for the increased R&D and patents. These effects are present controlling for both industry and technological position effects.

A Tale of Two Market Failures: Technology and Environmental Policy

Market failures associated with environmental pollution interact with market failures associated with the innovation and diffusion of new technologies. These combined market failures provide a strong rationale for a portfolio of public policies that foster emissions reduction as well as the development and adoption of environmentally beneficial technology. Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that the rate and direction of technological advance is influenced by market and regulatory incentives, and can be cost-effectively harnessed through the use of economicincentive based policy. In the presence of weak or nonexistent environmental policies, investments in the development and diffusion of new environmentally beneficial technologies are very likely to be less than would be socially desirable. Positive knowledge and adoption spillovers and information problems can further weaken innovation incentives. While environmental technology policy is fraught with difficulties, a long-term view suggests a strategy of experimenting with policy approaches and systematically evaluating their success.technology, research and development, environment, externality, policy

The Induced Innovation Hypothesis and Energy-Saving Technological Change

We develop a methodology for testing Hick’s induced innovation hypothesis by estimating a product-characteristics model of energy-using consumer durables, augmenting the hypothesis to allow for the influence of government regulations. For the products we explored, the evidence suggests: (i) the rate of overall innovation was independent of energy prices and regulations, (ii) the direction of innovation was responsive to energy price changes for some products but not for others, (iii) energy price changes induced changes in the subset of technically feasible models that were offered for sale, (iv) this responsiveness increased substantially during the period after energy-efficiency product labeling was required, and (v) nonetheless, a sizeable portion of efficiency improvements were autonomous.

Technological Change and the Environment

Environmental policy discussions increasingly focus on issues related to technological change. This is partly because the environmental consequences of social activity are frequently affected by the rate and direction of technological change, and partly because environmental policy interventions can themselves create constraints and incentives that have significant effects on the path of technological progress. This paper, prepared as a chapter draft for the forthcoming Handbook of Environmental Economics (North-Holland/Elsevier Science), summarizes for environmental economists current thinking on technological change in the broader economics literature, surveys the growing economic literature on the interaction between technology and the environment, and explores the normative implications of these analyses. We begin with a brief overview of the economics of technological change, and then examine three important areas where technology and the environment intersect: the theory and empirical evidence of induced innovation and the related literature on the effects of environmental policy on the creation of new, environmentally friendly technology; the theory and empirics of environmental issues related to technology diffusion; and analyses of the comparative technological impacts of alternative environmental policy instruments. We conclude with suggestions for further research on technological change and the environment.technological change, induced innovation, environment, policy

How High are the Giants' Shoulders: An Empirical Assessment of Knowledge Spillovers and Creative Destruction in a Model of Economic Growth

The pace of industrial innovation and growth is shaped by many forces that interact in complicated ways. Profit-maximizing firms pursue new ideas to obtain market power, but the pursuit of the same goal by other means that even successful inventions art eventually superseded by others; this known as creative destruction. New ideas not only yield new goods but also enrich the stock of knowledge of society and its potential to produce new ideas. To a great extent this knowledge is non-excludable, making research and inventions the source of powerful spillovers. The extent of spillovers depends on the rate at which new ideas outdate old ones, that is on the endogenous technological obsolescence of ideas, and on the rate at which knowledge diffuses among inventors. In this paper we build a simple model that allows us to organize our search for the empirical strength of the concepts emphasized above. We then use data on patents and patent citations as empirical counterparts of new ideas and knowledge spillovers, respectively, to estimate the model parameters. We find estimates of the annual rate of creative destruction in the range of 2 to 7 percent for the decade of the 1970s, which rates for individual sectors as high as 25 percent. For technological obsolescence, we find an increase over the century from about 3 percent per year to about 12 percent per year in 1990, with a noticeable plateau in the l970s. We find the rate of diffusion of knowledge to be quite rapid, with the mean lag between I and 2 years. Lastly, we find that the potency of spillovers from old ideas to new knowledge generation (as evidenced by patent citation rate) has been declining over the century: the resulting decline in the effective public stock of knowledge available to new inventors is quite consistent with the observed decline in the average private productivity of research inputs

Induction and Evolution in the Origin of Inventions: Evidence from Smoking Cessation Products

Neoclassical economic theory predicts that policies that discourage the consumption of a particular good will induce innovation in a socially desirable substitute. Evolutionary theory emphasizes the possibility of innovation waves associated with the identification of new dominant designs. We incorporate both of these possibilities in a model of the invention of new smoking cessation products, based on a new dataset of patents on such products from 1951-2004. We find that an increase in cigarette tax levels and smoking bans had no discernable impact on the industry-wide rate of invention in smoking cessation products. It does appear, however, that dominant designs did have substantial positive innovation effects. More specifically, the introduction of the nicotine gum and patch are estimated to have increased the rate of patenting activity in smoking cessation products by 60 and 79 percent, respectively, subject to a 10 percent rate of decay. Finally, these products had larger innovation effects at the firm level than among individual inventors.Patents, Technological Change, Smoking Cessation Products, Cigarette Taxes