Of Time and Space

At 4PM on April 5, Prof. Zorina Kahn (Bowdoin College) will discuss a paper entitled “Of Time and Space: Technological Spillovers among Patents and Unpatented Innovation in early U.S. Industrialization.”
Kahn is chair of Bowdoin’s economics department and the author of the award-winning The Democratization of Innovation . Her talk assesses the role of institutional mechanisms in generating technological knowledge spillovers. The estimation is over panel datasets of federal patent grants, and innovations that were granted prizes at annual industrial fairs of the American Institute of New York, between 1835 and 1870. One part of the talk tests the hypothesis of spatial autocorrelation in patenting and in the exhibited innovations. In keeping with the contract theory of patents, the procedure identifies high and statistically significant spatial autocorrelation, indicating the prevalence of geographical spillovers in the sample of inventions that were patented. The second part of the talk investigates whether per capita innovations/prizes in a county were affected by patenting in contiguous or adjacent counties. These results are consistent with the argument that patents enhance the diffusion of information for both patented and unpatented innovations, whereas inventions that garner prizes are less effective in generating external benefits from knowledge spillovers.