Increased foreign competition leads firms to increase their product patenting but not their process patenting. Large and productive firms increase both their product and process patenting in response to foreign competition.
Using the initial rollout of compulsory schooling in the United States, primary and secondary education increases the probability an individual will become an inventor.
Chinese import competition lowered the growth of manufacturing employment in India. Sufficiently literate, developed, or urban labor markets see positive manufacturing growth in response to export demand increases.
A publicly available dataset of product and process patents for U.S. manufacturing firms from 1980-2015. The process share of patenting fell from 26% in 1980 to 12% in 2015. The process share is low at the beginning of a firm’s product life cycle, peaks in the middle before plateauing at an intermediate level at the end of the life cycle.
On average, working from home does not impact the patenting productivity of corporate R&D offices. The R&D offices of sufficiently innovative firms experience a negative effect of working from home on patenting productivity.
Product patents generate more knowledge spillovers than process patents, especially when the patents are novel or in rapidly evolving areas of technology.