Value of invention, prolific inventor productivity and mobility: evidence from five countries, 1975-2002

William Latham, Christian Le Bas () and Dmitry Volodin ()
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Christian Le Bas: Université de Lyon, Lyon, F-69007, France ; CNRS, GATE Lyon St Etienne,F-69130 Ecully, France
Dmitry Volodin: Department of Economics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19711, USA

No 1133, Working Papers from Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to provide new insights into (1) the determinants of the value of inventions and (2) the role that mobility plays in the behavior of prolific inventors, whom we identify based on the number of patents exceeding a threshold of productivity. We examine mobility in two dimensions : from firm to firm (inter-firm) and from one technical field to another. We exploit data on patents filed by inventors from five countries (France, the UK, Germany, the US and Japan) in the US Patent and Trademark office during the period from 1975 to 2002. From our regressions we obtain a rich set of results. In particular we show that : (1) as predicted by evolutionary theory, inventor productivity is a positive determinant of invention value, (2) inter-firm mobility is a consistently positive determinant of productivity and (3) technological mobility is a negative determinant. The last implies that the more specialized an inventor is, the higher his productivity is.

Keywords: prolific inventor; mobility; productivity; value of invention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Value of invention, prolific inventor productivity and mobility: evidence from five countries, 1975-2002 (2012)
Working Paper: Value of invention, prolific inventor productivity and mobility: evidence from five countries, 1975-2002 (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gat:wpaper:1133

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