The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Patent Statistics as Economic Indicators: A Survey
Open accessAbstract
This survey reviews the growing use of patent data in economic analysis.After describing some of the main characteristics of patents and patent data, it focuses on the use of patents as an indicator of technological change.Cross-sectional and time-series studies of the relationship of patents to R&D expenditures are reviewed, as well as scattered estimates of the distribution of patent values and the value of patent rights, the latter being based on recent analyses of European patent renewal data.Time-series trends of patents granted in the U.S. are examined and their decline in the 1970s is found to be an artifact of the budget stringencies at the Patent Office.The longer run downward trend in patents per R&D dollar is interpreted not as an indication of diminishing returns but rather as a reflection of the changing meaning of such data over time.The conclusion is reached that, in spite of many difficulties and reservations, patent data remain a unique resource for the study of technical change.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Strategic alliances and interfirm knowledge transfer
Mowery, D. C., Oxley, J. E., & Silverman, B. S. (1996) · Strategic Management Journal · doi:10.1002/smj.4250171108 · Cited by 3,426
Competition and Innovation: An Inverted U Relationship
Aghion, P., Bloom, N., Blundell, R. W., Griffith, R., & Howitt, P. (2004) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.1306944 · Cited by 2,117
Competition and innovation: an inverted U relationship
Blundell, R., Howitt, P., Griffith, R., Aghion, P., & Bloom, N. (2002) · Working Paper Series · doi:10.1920/wp.ifs.2002.0204 · Cited by 2,109
Powell, W. W., & Snellman, K. (2004) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.29.010202.100037 · Cited by 1,922
Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Economic Growth: Evidence from GEM data
Wong, P. K., Ho, Y. P., & Autio, E. (2005) · Small Business Economics · doi:10.1007/s11187-005-2000-1 · Cited by 1,643
Metadata
- Authors
- Griliches, Z.
- Venue
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- Publisher
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- Published
- 1990-03
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1661-1707
- OpenAlex
- W1561438477
- Cited by
- 5,828
- References
- 0
- Type
- report
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Patent Statistics as Economic Indicators: A Survey. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.3386/w3301
- The paper
- Griliches, Z. (1990). Patent Statistics as Economic Indicators: A Survey. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w3301
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
