Seminar by Eduardo Melero

Next Tuesday, the 15^th of November at 11:00 GMT (i.e.12:00 Amsterdam time, 13:00 Athens time), the TECHNIS research group and ΤΙΜΕ-ΜΒΕ will jointly present a web seminar. The presenter will be Eduardo Melero (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid). The title of the talk is "The Causal Effect of Patents on Inventor Mobility".  

The webminar program we use is VSee. A one minute video with instructions on how to run VSee can be found in our webpage at http://technisnet.org/seminars.html (scroll down a bit).  

Remember to login to VSee a couple of minutes before we start, and keep in mind that it is usually convenient to have a pair of headphones with a mic and a good camera. When the seminar starts you are kindly asked to turn your microphone off as to block surrounding noise.

 Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of obtaining a patent on the mobility of starting employee inventors. If patents serve as signals of inventor ability, they should increase the mobility of their authors. In contrast, if patents make their author's human capital more firm-specific because of appropriability reasons, they should have a detrimental effect on mobility. We draw on USPTO patent application data for the period 2001-2012 to investigate this question. Using examiner leniency as an instrumental variable for granted patents, we find that being granted one additional patent decreases inventor mobility by about 24 percent. The estimated effect is twice as big for the case of discrete technologies (Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals), where the appropiability effect of patents is stronger. This negative effect is also stronger in cases in the absence of other sources of specific human capital (e.g., inventors with few co-authors and inventors working outside the company's core). Overall, we interpret our evidence as suportive of the appropriability hypothesis.