Lunch Seminar Economics (LSE) - 2020/2021
Interviene: Matteo Tubiana, Università di Bergamo
Abstract
The article explores and discusses the efficiency of R&D investments and the appropriateness of intellectual property rights altogether. On the one hand, some scholars identify an increasing difficulty in creating new, innovative knowledge and list it as a cause of the secular stagnation affecting western countries. On the other hand, there is a debate whether intellectual property rights systems balance the need to appropriate knowledge returns and that of accessing cumulative knowledge to feed new knowledge recombination. Exploiting data about the world’s largest R&D investors between 2007 and 2015, matched with their patent filings and citation profiles, we find that a sizeable and increasing number of patents do not contribute to subsequent knowledge creation: they are unused from a knowledge creation perspective. Moreover, by estimating a set of firm-level knowledge production functions augmented with the propensity to patent and research productivity factors, we find that R&D investments generate used and unused patents by similar extents. Such figures are robust across industries and patent offices. We posit that unused patents are socially undesirable. Finally, we discuss and empirically explore the reasons behind the creation of unused patents (market signalling, projects failures, strategic non-use) and some implications for innovation policies.