Adam Jaffe

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

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

The challenge of mitigating climate change has focused recent attention on basic scientific research feeding into the development of new energy technologies (Popp, 2017). Energy innovation tends to consist of a series of partially overlapping processes involving: (1) the production of scientific and technological knowledge, (2) the translation of that knowledge into working technologies or artifacts, and (3) the introduction of the artifacts into the marketplace, where they are matched with users' requirements. However, relatively little data are available showing how long each of these processes takes for energy technologies. Here we combine information from patent applications with bibliographic data to shine light on the second process--that is, the translation of scientific knowledge into working prototypes. Our results show that "clean" energy technologies are more dependent on underlying science than "dirty" technologies, and that the average lag between publication of scientific findings and the incorporation of those findings in clean energy patents has risen from about five to about eight years since the 1980s. These findings will help policymakers to devise more effective mechanisms and strategies for accelerating the overall rate of technological change in this domain.

This paper presents estimates of the R&D depreciation rate using survey data on Australian inventions. Its novelty is twofold. First, it relies on direct observation of the revenue streams of inventions. This is in sharp contrast with previous studies, which all rely on models based on indirect observation and require strong identifying assumptions. Second, it presents estimates of the effect of patent protection on the depreciation rate. Results suggest that the yearly depreciation rate varies in a range of 1 to 5 per cent, although the depreciation rate is stronger in the first two years of inventions averaging 8-9 per cent. Patent protection slows down the erosion of profits by about 1-2 percentage points

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, founder of Raytheon and one-time engineering dean at MIT, delivered a report to the president of the United States that argued for the importance of public support for science, and the importance of science for the future of the nation. The report, Science: The Endless Frontier, set America on a path toward strong and well-funded institutions of science, creating an intellectual architecture that still defines scientific endeavor today. In The Changing Frontier, Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin Jones bring together a group of prominent scholars to consider the changes in science and innovation in the ensuing decades. The contributors take on such topics as changes in the organization of scientific research, the geography of innovation, modes of entrepreneurship, and the structure of research institutions and linkages between science and innovation. An important analysis of where science stands today, The Changing Frontier will be invaluable to practitioners and policy makers alike.