Patent Statistics as Economic Indicators: A Survey

Abstract

Explores how patents statistics can be utilized to examine innovation patterns and technological change within firms, industries, and regions, and discusses the challenges in their interpretation. Patent documents contain a wide array of information including the name and address of the inventor, citations to previous and related patents, the patent class to which it belongs, and a complete description of the invention covered by the patent. Through a review of applicable works, the relationship between patents and areas such as inventive activity, R&D, patent rights, patent values, stock market values, and spillovers are examined. A review of the relationship between aggregate trends in patenting and the bureaucratic cycle, and the relation between aggregate patenting and the business cycle are provided. The results of this review demonstrate that there is a strong relationship between patent numbers and R&D expenditures in the cross-sectional dimension, which indicates differences in innovative activity across different firms can be identified through patent data. The relationship between patents and R&D expenditures can also be found in the within-firm analysis. Overall, this review supports the idea that patent data can be used to examine the process of technological change and innovation. (SRD)

Keywords: Research methods, Knowledge spillovers, Economic indicators, Technology innovation, Patents, R&D, Technological change, Patent ownership, Business cycles, Innovation process, Patent research