Foreign Patenting in Germany, 1877-1932

Abstract

In this paper, we use both patents' individual life span and foreign patenting activities in Germany to identify the most valuable patents of the 21 most innovative countries (except for Germany) from the European Core, the European periphery and overseas between 1877 and 1932. Our empirical analysis reveals that important characteristics of the international distribution of foreign patents are time-invariant. In particular, the distribution of foreign patents across countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was as highly skewed as it was in the late twentieth century-and even dominated by the same major research economies. Our analysis suggests that firms' technological advantages were influenced both by exogenous local factors, such as the countries' resource endowment, and by endogenous factors, such as the national education and research system or the countries' actual stage of economic development.

Patents, foreign direct investment and economic growth in Australia, 1860–2010

“…Innovative activity in service industries sometimes goes unrecorded as patents. Several studies have sought to address the problem of heterogeneity by using the length of the period of a patent as a proxy for quality, focusing on a smaller set of data—those that survived for more than 10 years (Degner & Streb, 2013; Streb et al, 2006). Others, however, have thrown doubt on the validity of such renewal of patent rights given the costs involved and the inability of investors to judge the long‐term value of their invention (MacLeod et al, 2003).…”