Leveraging a new measure of patent citation trees (Corredoira & Banerjee, 2015), we demonstrate that research funded by the federal government is likely to spark more active technological trajectories. Our findings tie government funding to the generation of breakthrough inventions. The...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between rising short-termism and the nature of innovation in US public firms, 1980-2019. Breakthrough inventions, or those that significantly influence later innovation, require sub-technologies to be created that don’t yet exist. We argue that these...