We develop a model of growth driven by successive improvements in 'General Purpose Technologies' (GPT's), such as the steam engine, electricity, or micro-electronics. Each new generation of GPT's prompts investments in complementary inputs, and impacts the economy after enough such compatible...

The goal of this paper is to address the problem of 'product innovations' (i.e. new goods. increased variety, and quality change) in the construction of price indices and, by extension, in the measurement of economic performance. The premise is that a great deal of technical progress takes the...

A survey of recent patentees was conducted to elicit their perceptions regarding the importance of their inventions, the extent of their communication with other inventors, and the relationship of both importance and communication to observed patent citations. A cohort of 1993 patentees were...

The extent to which new technological knowledge flows across institutional and national boundaries is a question of great importance for public policy and the modeling of economic growth. This paper develops a model of the process generating subsequent citations to patents as a lens for viewing...

This paper explores the patterns of citations among patents taken out by inventors in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and Japan. We find (1) patents assigned to the same firm are more likely to cite each other, and come sooner than other citations; (2) patents in the same patent class are...

As patent data become more available in machine-readable form, an increasing number of researchers have begun to use measures based on patents and their citations as indicators of technological output and information flow. This paper explores the economic meaning of these citation-based patent...

The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of R&D policy in Israel, and critically examine the policies currently in place as well as proposals to change them. We review in Part I the various programs of the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) of the Ministry of Industry and Trade in...

The main goal of this paper is to put forward a methodology for the measurement of product innovations using a value metric, i.e., equating the "magnitude" of innovations with the welfare gains that they generate. This research design is applied to the case of Computed Tomography (CT) Scanners,...

Studies of diffusion have traditionally relied on specific distributions-primarily the logistic- to characterize and estimate those processes.We argue here that such approach gives rise to serious problems of comparability and interpretation, and may result in large biases inthe estimates of the...

The goal is to tackle anew the main problems encountered in using patent data in economic research, namely, the large variance in the value of patents, and the difficulties in matching patents with economic categories. The first is addressed with the aid of patent citations, the second with...