Based on a survey questionnaire administered to 1478 R&D labs in the U.S. manufacturing sector in 1994, we find that firms typically protect the profits due to invention with a range of mechanisms, including patents, secrecy, lead time advantages and the use of complementary marketing and...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between patenting, innovation, and federal antitrust enforcement towards firms in the manufacturing sector. I examine whether the likelihood of antitrust litigation is influenced by patent histories and R&D expenditures, after...

Firms invest in scientific research to increase their chances of landing lucrative procurement contracts with the U.S. government. This is an important, but understudied channel through which the government encourages corporate research, particularly when other market mechanisms are...

Corporate science in America emerged in the interwar period, as some companies set up state-of-the-art corporate laboratories, hired trained scientists, and embarked upon basic research of the kind we would associate today with academic institutions. Using a newly assembled dataset on U.S....

This paper presents a comparative analysis of productivity growth in the U.S. and Japanese electrical machinery industries in the postwar period. This industry has experienced rapid growth in output and productivity and high rates of capital formation in both countries. A substantial amount of...

We compute rates of growth in labor productivity during the 1973-80 period for samples of individual manufacturing firms, in both Japan and the U.S., and relate them to differences in the rates of growth in their capital-labor ratios and in their intensities of R&D effort. Japanese firms spent...

This paper is an attempt to assess the contribution of R&D to growth of output in U.S. manufacturing industries. The important issues to address are: whether the slower growth of R&D expenditures in recent years has been the cause of slowdown in the growth of productivity, and what the factors...

Recent policy attention has focused on proposals to reduce prices for drugs that have received public funding. From an implementation perspective, such policies rely on public disclosure of government support for research. In this paper, we highlight two conceptual problems with past attempts to...

This study evaluates the impact of high-skilled immigrants on US technology formation. We use reduced-form specifications that exploit large changes in the H-1B visa program. Higher H-1B admissions increase immigrant science and engineering (SE) employment and patenting by inventors with Indian...

The standard view of U.S. technological history is that the locus of invention shifted during the early twentieth century to large firms whose in-house research laboratories were superior sites for advancing the complex technologies of the second industrial revolution. In recent years this view...