Working papers and book chapters

Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) economists and their collaborators conduct a variety of policy relevant research and make their preliminary findings available as working papers and book chapters.  

The contribution of startups, venture finance, and patenting to innovation in U.S. agriculture

Gregory D. Graff, Charles deGrazia, and Nicholas Rada
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-2 
July 2024 
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To evaluate the role played by startup companies in the innovation ecosystem of U.S. agriculture, we compile a unique dataset of 6,024 startups founded 1987-2019 that details their financing lifecycles, annual economic performance, and patenting activities. One-third of the startups in the sample have observable signs that they are contributing to innovation. Yet many of them operate in industry sectors or technology fields not generally identified as agricultural. In aggregate, external financing and patenting by startups have grown substantially over the time period, and those startups with patent applications have received more external financing than those without. We use a discrete-time survival analysis to test factors related to startups receiving investments as well as achieving successful financial exits. We find startups that filed for a patent have a higher likelihood of receiving investments than those that did not. Patent applications also increase the relative probability of a successful financial exit, which takes place primarily through mergers and acquisitions (M&As). In about a third of the M&A exits reported by startups with patent portfolios, the startups are acquired by corporate incumbents already conducting R&D in agriculture. The startups acquired by incumbents hold relatively larger portfolios of patents that are more highly cited yet technologically more narrowly focused. Importantly, a substantial portion of the startups in the sample are still too young to have attained venture financing let alone a financial exit.

Untapped Potential: Investigating Gender Disparities in Patent Citations

Gauri Subramani and Michelle Saksena
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-3 
July 2024 
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Innovation is often a cumulative process that relies heavily on prior research. A primary way to measure knowledge flows in the context of invention is by using patent citations. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the gender composition of inventor teams and the likelihood that a patent is cited by patent applicants on subsequent patents. We see that patents by majority-female inventor teams receive 4-22% fewer citations than patents by majority-male inventor teams. We explore the potential drivers of this gap and find that citations to patents granted to majority female teams are more likely to be omitted from the citations of a patent than are those patents with similar content granted to majority male teams. We identify that this gap is primarily driven by applicant-added citations rather than those added by patent examiners. The gap appears to be exacerbated by gender-based team homophily; that is, patents by majority male teams are more likely to cite other patents granted to majority male teams. Second, we find evidence that patents by majority female teams are less likely to be further developed, and consequently, are cited less frequently compared to patents granted to majority male inventor teams. We interpret this finding as suggestive evidence that the gender composition of inventor teams can affect follow-on patenting and thus can have broader implications on the landscape of innovation. This work has implications for our understanding of the relationship between gender and the drivers of innovation, as well as the limitations of citations as a measure of patent impact.

Technical Documentation for Patent Litigation Docket Reports Data, 1963-2020

Andrew A. Toole, Richard Miller and Ted M. Sichelman
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-1 
March 2024 
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Competitive Dynamism in Nascent Markets: Trademarks and Superstar Firm Entry in the Metaverse

Wendy A. Bradley and Julian Kolev 
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2023-1 
September 2023 
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Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO

Nicholas A. Pairolero, Andrew A. Toole, Peter-Anthony Pappas, Charles deGrazia and Mike Teodorescu
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2022-1
November 2022
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Immunity to the COVID-19 shock? The case of US innovation, resilience and ingenuity: Global innovation responses to Covid-19

Walter G. Park, Andrew A. Toole, Gerard Torres and Richard D. Miller
Resilience and Ingenuity: Global Innovation Responses to Covid-19
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The Miner Act of 2006: Innovating for Safety and Health in U.S. Mining

Andrew A. Toole, James Forman, and Asrat Tesfayesus
Global Challenges for Innovation in Mining Industries
April 2022
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Using Intellectual Property Data to Measure Cross-Border Knowledge Flows

Jake Dubbert, Alexander V. Giczy, Nicholas A. Pairolero, and Andrew A. Toole
Trade in knowledge: Intellectual property, trade and development in a transformed global economy
February 2022
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Technical Documentation for Matching Patents and Trademarks to the 2017 National Establishment Time Series Database

Ryan Hughes, Charles deGrazia, and Julian Kolev
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-4
September 2021
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Software Piracy and IP Management Practices: Strategic Responses to Product-Market Imitation

Wendy A. Bradley and Julian Kolev
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-3
August 2021
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Artificial Intelligence Patent Dataset (AIPD) on a blue background with an outline of a head.

Identifying artificial intelligence (AI) invention: A novel AI patent dataset

Alexander V. Giczy, Nicholas A. Pairolero, and Andrew Toole
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-2
June 2021
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PatentsView: An open data platform to advance science and technology policy

Andrew Toole, Christina Jones, and Sarvothaman Madhavan
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-1
June 2021
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Technical Documentation for the 2019 Patent Examination Research Dataset (Patex) Release

Richard Miller
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-4
August 2020
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U.S. Intellectual Property and Counterfeit Goods—Landscape Review of Existing/Emerging Research

Vega Bharadwaj, Marieke Brock, Bridey Heing, Ramon Miron, and Noor Mukarram
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-3
April 2020
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Piracy Landscape Study: Analysis of Existing and Emerging Research Relevant to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Enforcement of Commercial-Scale Piracy

Brett Danaher, Michael D. Smith, and Rahul Telang
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-2
April 2020
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The Promise of Machine Learning for Patent Landscaping

Andrew A. Toole, Nicholas Pairolero, James Forman, and Alexander V. Giczy
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-1
March 2020
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Previous working papers