Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 27 November 2019
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 27 November 2019, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room Number LG 0.423. Markus Nagler (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) will be talking about “Disclosure and Cumulative Innovation: Evidence from the Patent Depository Library Program”.
Please find below the abstract:
How important is access to patent documents for subsequent innovation? We examine the expansion of the USPTO Patent Library system after 1975. Patent libraries provided access to patents before the Internet. We find that after patent library opening, local patenting increases by 9-23% relative to similar regions, depending on the control group. Additional analyses suggest that disclosure of technical information drives this effect: the effect is strongest in technologies with clear disclosure, inventors increasingly take up ideas from outside their region, and inventor team composition is unaffected. We thus provide evidence that disclosure plays an important role in cumulative innovation.