دانلود رایگان مقاله آیا چرخه های تجاری بر ثبت اختراع تاثیر می گذارد؟ شواهد از دفتر ثبت اختراع اروپا

abstract

This paper studies the sensitivity of patent filings to the business cycle using patent filings at the European Patent Office (EPO). Using a dynamic model of patenting and the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter method to separate the cyclical component of real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from its trend component, we find that patent filings are strongly pro-cyclical. This supports the view that short term resource constraints affect patenting decisions, even if there are longer term factors that determine innovation. The study also has significance for forecasting patenting behavior, which is important for policy decision-making, institutional operations, and strategic business planning. Forecasts that rely only on trends prove to be less accurate amidst economic booms and recessionary shocks, such as the recent global financial crisis.

7. Conclusion

This paper has provided a dynamic panel data analysis of patent filings and business cycles. Thus far, limited empirical studies have been conducted on the relationship between patenting and business fluctuations. Moreover, prior work has not applied methods for distinguishing between market trends and cycles, such as filtering methods that extract cyclical shocks from movements in a time-series, but has relied instead on ad-hoc, informal measures of shocks. By applying more rigorous methods to a broad panel dataset of source countries of the EPO, this paper finds that the response of patent filings to GDP shocks is quite elastic and pro-cyclical, lending support to the resource effect of business cycles on innovation. The findings are also robust to alternative measures of business cycles, and thus do not depend on the HP-filtering method we adopted. The sensitivity of patent filings to business cycles is also no different during the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 than during the rest of the sample period. Lastly, some out-of-sample forecasting experiments show that incorporating business cycles can help improve the accuracy of predicting patenting behavior. They show, however, that while GDP shocks can result in significant perturbations in patenting, the effects of cyclical shocks on patenting are short-lived.