期刊-NBER美国国民经济研究局-winter2007_64页_906kb

NBER 2006/7 Winter Issue Summary

Core Content Overview

The NBER Reporter for Winter 2006/7 provides a comprehensive overview of the Productivity Program and related research areas, including knowledge flows, patents, R&D, market structure, and innovation dynamics. It highlights the evolution of research methodologies and findings, emphasizing the role of intellectual property, collaboration, and technological progress in shaping productivity and innovation.

Main Research Areas and Key Findings

1. Innovation at the Level of the Individual Inventor

• Benjamin Jones shows that the age at which Nobel Prize winners and other inventors produce their most significant work has increased over the 20th century, correlating with a rise in the age of completing formal education.
• David Galenson finds that early innovators in art tend to make sudden breakthroughs, while late innovators do so more gradually.
• Kenneth Sokoloff and collaborators analyze the historical shift in the relationship between inventors and firms, noting that the rise of R&D laboratories in large corporations in the 1920s significantly changed the innovation landscape.
• Patent data is used to study the evolution of inventor roles, with Manuel Trajtenberg developing a methodology to track individual inventors across over four million patent records, revealing that 40% of patentees hold multiple patents, and 70,000 hold more than ten.

2. Knowledge Flows and Innovation Across Organizations

• Geographic proximity between academia and industry R&D labs is shown to increase knowledge spillovers, especially in pharmaceuticals.
• Lynne Zucker, Michael Darby, and Jeff Armstrong find that collaborations between top researchers and firm employees are more effective in predicting firm success.
• Co-authorship patterns among physicists in France indicate that knowledge flows are much stronger within the same laboratory than across.
• Jeffrey Furman and Scott Stern examine the impact of biological resource centers (BRCs) on the diffusion of knowledge in molecular biology, showing that BRCs reduce the marginal cost of research and increase citation rates.
• James Adams reports that team size in scientific research has increased by 50% from 1981 to 1999, suggesting a rise in the division of labor and scientific productivity.

3. Diffusion of Superior Management Practices within Multinational Firms

• Nick Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John VanReenen find that U.S.-owned multinational establishments in the UK have a stronger relationship between IT investment and productivity growth compared to non-U.S. multinationals or domestic firms.
• Lee Branstetter shows that Japanese multinational firms in the U.S. are a major channel for knowledge spillovers between Japan and the U.S.
• Wolfgang Keller and Stephen Yeaple find that FDI spillovers in the U.S. between 1987 and 1996 explain about 11% of the multifactor productivity growth in manufacturing.

4. Patents, R&D, Innovation and Firms' Valuations

• Fiona Murray and Scott Stern find a modest anti-commons effect, where the granting of patents leads to a decline in citations to scientific publications, especially for those with public sector affiliations.
• Iain Cockburn and Megan MacGarvie examine the effects of software patents and find both stifling and stimulating impacts on market entry and exit.
• David Popp, Ted Juhl, and Daniel Johnson analyze grant lags in patent applications, noting that biotechnology patents face longer delays due to complexity, while software patents face delays due to high volume.
• Carol Corrado, Charles Hulten, and Daniel Sichel estimate that the exclusion of intangible capital from GDP calculations has led to an underestimation of U.S. non-farm business output by about $1 trillion by the late 1990s.

NBER Services and Resources

• A free email service provides daily links to U.S. government data releases, including unemployment, GDP, and trade data.
• The NBER is a private, nonprofit research organization founded in 1920, focusing on objective quantitative analysis of the American economy.
• The NBER's Patent Citation Data File is a public database used by researchers to study the impact of patents on innovation and productivity.

Key Researchers and Contributions

• Ernst R. Berndt outlines the Productivity Program's research focus, emphasizing R&D, patents, incentives, knowledge spillovers, and market structure.
• Manuel Trajtenberg develops data mining methodologies to track individual inventors and their patenting history.
• Bronwyn Hall and collaborators explore the valuation effects of R&D and patents, highlighting the market value of innovation and the underinvestment in certain countries.
• Jeffrey Furman investigates knowledge flows and spillovers in pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.

Conclusion

The NBER's Productivity Program continues to be a vital center for research on innovation, productivity growth, and the role of intellectual property. The studies highlight the evolution of innovation patterns, the importance of collaboration and knowledge transfer, and the impact of policy and institutional changes on the research and development landscape. These findings contribute significantly to the understanding of economic growth and technological progress in both academic and industrial contexts.