Research
Firm Locational Patenting Decisions (Job Market Paper) (link)
I analyze how firms decide whether and where to seek patent protection domestically and abroad by constructing a patent decision model into a Ricardian model of trade with rival entry. In the model, innovating firms compete with rival firms on price, where rivals force the innovating firm to reduce markups and lower the innovating firm's probability of obtaining monopolistic profits. Patenting serves to reduce the number of rival firms by increasing their fixed overhead costs, thereby providing innovating firms with higher expected profits from reduced competition. In the equilibrium, the model predicts that countries with higher states of technology, more competition and better patent protection are able to solicit a greater proportion of patents. The model also finds that industries that are more substitutable and have lower variability in their labor efficiency tend to patent more frequently. Finally, using a generalized framework of the model, I am able to estimate market-based measures of country-level patent protection with a high degree of accuracy using a patent family database.
Trade Liberalization and its Effects on Domestic Innovation (link)
This paper looks at the effects of trade liberalization in a dynamic, heterogeneous firm trade model with R\&D driven growth. In the model, knowledge spillovers occur through two separate channels: an intertemporal channel, and an international channel. I assume that international spillovers only happen by way of imports, which will have varying effects on domestic innovation levels after trade liberalization. On the one hand, I show that trade liberalization causes the least productive firms to exit, lowers the total mass of global varieties and causes remaining domestic firms to reallocate resources towards exporting, thereby hindering innovation. On the other hand, liberalization simultaneously allows for firms to obtain cheaper, higher quality imports and access to new technologies, which thereby speed up the innovation process. The overall net effect on country productivity growth will therefore depend on the trade elasticity resulting from liberalization. To test the model, I use country-industry level patent, trade and tariff data for more than 50 countries between 1997 to 2006. The results from the country-level analysis suggests that innovation levels benefit from liberalization. However, the opposite result happens at the industry-level. This suggests that the spillovers from trade occur by obtaining cheaper, higher quality inputs, as opposed to reverse engineering similar-type products.
Data Mining and Probabilistic Matching Methods for Linking Patents to Trade: A Platform for Empirical Analysis of International Patent Strategies with Travis Lybbert
This paper describes and explores new methods for constructing concordances between the International Patent Classification (IPC) codes and various industry classification systems such as Standard International Trade Classification (SITC, Rev. 2), International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC, Rev. 2) and Harmonized System (HS). The methods incorporate some of the latest developments in text analysis and keyword extraction programs and apply them to patent data. We then compare the results of these new concordances to existing technology concordances and highlight the potential improvements from our methodology. We conclude with a discussion on some of the possible applications of the concordance and provide an example of using the concordance to analyze international patenting strategies.
How Firms Adjust to Global Changes in Intellectual Property Rights