Institutions and Technological Innovation During Early Economic Growth: Evidence from the Great Inventors of the United States, 1790-1930
54 Pages Posted: 2 Nov 2004
Date Written: October 2004
Abstract
Biographical information on a sample of renowned U.S. inventors is combined with information on the patents they received over their careers, and employed to highlight the implications of patent institutions for markets in inventions and for democratization. The United States deliberately created a patent system that differed from existing European systems in ways that significantly affected the course of technological change. Patent rights in the U.S. helped to define and enforce tradable assets in new technological knowledge. By facilitating access to such markets in technology, patents enhanced the benefits to relatively disadvantaged individuals who might otherwise have been unable to directly extract returns from their technological creativity, and their response to such incentives increased overall technological progress. For this reason, despite the defects of patent monopolies, developing economies today may still advance technological progress and improve social welfare by providing broad access to property rights in inventions.
JEL Classification: N00, O3, O31, O34
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Inventors, Firms, and the Market for Technology in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
-
Inventive Activity and the Market for Technology in the United States, 1840-1920
-
Financing Invention During the Second Industrial Revolution: Cleveland, Ohio, 1870-1920
By Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Margaret C. Levenstein, ...
-
The Decline of the Independent Inventor: A Schumpterian Story?
-
Mobilizing Venture Capital During the Second Industrial Revolution: Cleveland, Ohio, 1870 - 1920
By Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Margaret C. Levenstein, ...
-
Intellectual Property Right Regimes, Firms and the Commodification of Knowledge
By Benjamin Coriat and Olivier Weinstein
-
The Reorganization of Inventive Activity in the United States During the Early Twentieth Century
By Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Kenneth L. Sokoloff, ...
-
A Shop Floor View of Growth in Turn-of-The-Century Cleveland