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...

We introduce technological influence as a variable to measure an invention’s direct and indirect impact on the evolution of technology. This provides a novel means to study the short and long run effect of invention antecedents on technological evolution, invention activity, and economic...