research

2022

1. Working Paper

   A New Dataset to Study a Century of Innovation in Europe and in the US

   Bergeaud, Antonin, and Verluise, Cyril

   Sep 2022

   Abs PDF Code

   Innovation is an important driver of potential growth but quantitative evidence on the dynamics of innovative activities in the long-run are hardly documented due to the lack of data, especially in Europe. In this paper, we introduce PatentCity, a novel dataset on the location and nature of patentees from the 19th century using information derived from an automated extraction of relevant information from patent documents published by the German, French, British and US Intellectual Property offices. This dataset has been constructed with the view of facilitating the exploration of the geography of innovation and includes additional information on citizenship and occupation of inventors.

2. Working Paper

   The Rise of China’s Technological Power: the Perspective from Frontier Technologies

   Verluise, Cyril, and Bergeaud, Antonin

   Dec 2022

   Abs PDF Code

   We develop a new method to identify patent in specific technologies and use it to study the contribution of the US, Europe, China, and Japan to frontier innovation. We find that China’s contribution to frontier technology has become quantitatively similar to the US in the late 2010s while overcoming the European and Japanese contributions. Although China still exhibits stigmas of a catching up economy, these stigmas are on the downside. The quality of frontier innovation published at the Chinese Patent Office has leveled up to the quality of patents published at the European and Japanese patent offices.

2020

1. Working Paper

   The Missing 15 Percent of Patent Citations

   Verluise, Cyril, Cristelli, Gabriele, Higham, Kyle, and Rassenfosse, Gaétan

   Dec 2020

   Abs PDF Code

   Patent citations are one of the most commonly-used metrics in the innovation literature. Leading uses of patent-to-patent citations are associated with the quantification of inventions’ quality and the measurement of knowledge flows. Due to their widespread availability, scholars have exploited citations listed on the front-page of patent documents. Citations appearing in the full-text of patent documents have been neglected. We apply modern machine learning methods to extract these citations from the text of USPTO patent documents. Overall, we are able to recover an additional 15 percent of patent citations that could not be found using only front-page data. We show that ’in-text’ citations bring a different type of information compared to front-page citations. They exhibit higher text-similarity to the citing patents and alter the ranking of patent importance.

2016

1. REI

   Les comportements de détention de liquidités dans les sociétés non financières du G7 ont-ils évolué depuis la crise?

   Broyer, Sylvain, Schneider, Emmanuel, and Verluise, Cyril

   Revue d’économie industrielle Dec 2016

   Abs

   Cash holdings of G7 corporates have hit new historical highs since the financial crisis. A common idea is that the precautionary motive would be the main factor: the accumulation of cash would result from lack of access to bank financing that corporates underwent during the financial crisis. We take an in-depth look at the development in cash holdings by corporates in the G7 and carry out an econometric test to identify whether the financial crisis has brought a regime switch. Our results indicate that cash holdings due to caution have increased only in those G7 countries where the disintermediation of external funding has also increased (USA, UK, Japan). In continental Europe, our tests invalidate the hypothesis of a regime switch in cash holdings.‪