Patent citation data are used in a growing body of economics and business research on technological diffusion. Until … now, there exists little evidence on whether patent citations are a good measure of knowledge flows. Our paper assesses … the legitimacy of using European patent citations as a measure of technology flows. It uses information from the Community …

estimation is over panel datasets of patent grants, and unpatented innovations that were submitted for prizes at the annual … hypothesize that the difference partly owes to the design of patent institutions, which explicitly incorporate mechanisms for …