Petra Moser's Homepage

Research Interests

Applied Microeconomics, Economic History, and Economics of Innovation

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Publications

How Do Patent Laws Influence Innovation? Evidence from 19th-Century World's Fairs

American Economic Review, vol. 95 (4) , September 2005, pp. 1215-1236 [ Full Text ] December 2004 An earlier version of this paper was published as NBER Working Paper No. 9909.

Abstract: Studies of innovation have focused on the effects of patent laws on the number of innovations but ignored effects on the direction of technological change. This paper introduces a new data set of close to fifteen thousand innovations at the Crystal Palace World’s Fair in 1851 and at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 to examine the effects of patent laws on the direction of innovation. The paper tests the following argument: if innovative activity is motivated by expected profits, and if the effectiveness of patent protection varies across industries, then innovation in countries without patent laws should focus on industries where alternative mechanisms to protect intellectual property are effective. Analyses of exhibition data for twelve countries in 1851 and ten countries in 1876 indicate that inventors in countries without patent laws focus on a small set of industries where patents were less important, while innovation in countries with patent laws appears to be much more diversified. These findings suggest that patents help to determine the direction of technical change and that the adoption of patent laws in countries without such laws may alter existing patterns of comparative advantage across countries.

Summarized in “A Stroll Through Patent History”, The New York Times, September 23, 2003

Was Electricity a General Purpose Technology?
Evidence from Historical Patent Citations

with Tom Nicholas, The American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, May 2004, vol.94, no.2, pp.388-394. [ Full Text ]

Working Papers

Do Patents Facilitate Knowledge Spillovers?
Evidence from the Economic Geography of Innovations in 1851

Presented at the NBER Summer Institute, Cambridge, July 2005, [ Full Text ]

Abstract: The two primary goals of patent laws are to encourage innovation and to diffuse the knowledge that results from it. This paper uses differences in patenting rates across industries to examine whether patent laws fulfill the second function that is assigned to them. It asks whether patents help to diffuse advances in technical knowledge, that is, whether patents help to facilitate knowledge spillovers. Preliminary findings based on the location of 4,461 English exhibits at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851 suggest that 19th-century patent laws did help to facilitate the diffusion of new ideas. Innovations in industries with high patenting rates were geographically dispersed, while innovations in industries with low patenting rates were geographically concentrated. Without patenting, innovation clustered not only across counties, but also within cities, and the quality of innovations was highest within these clusters of inventive activity.

What Do Inventors Patent?
Presented at Stanford, February 15, 2006. Revised March 24, 2006. [ Full Text ]
Abstract: Both theoretical and empirical analyses of innovation use patents as a proxy for innovation. Inventors, however, indicate that they prefer alternatives to patents, such as secrecy, to protect their intellectual property. This paper takes advantage of a unique historical data set of more than 7,000 British and American innovations at the Crystal Palace World Fair of 1851 to examine the relationship between patents and innovation. Exhibition data offer many advantages over contemporary sources. Most importantly, they include innovations with and without patents. Moreover, exhibition data are comparable across countries and across industries, and they include measures of the quality of innovation. The data suggest that the share of innovations that are patented may be much smaller than has been previously thought: in 1851, less than one in five inventors relied on patents to protect their intellectual property. Comparisons between Britain and the United States suggest that even the most fundamental differences in patent laws failed to raise the proportion of patented innovations. Moreover, the share of innovations that were patented varied significantly across industries. In 1851, only 5 percent of chemical innovations were patented, compared to 30 percent of innovations in machinery. These results are robust to comparisons across countries, across high- and average quality, and across rural and urban innovations.

War and Ethnic Discrimination:
Evidence from Applications to the New York Stock Exchange from 1883 to 1973

Presented at Stanford, December 5, 2005, revised on January 4, 2006. [ Full Text ]

Abstract: Discrimination is difficult to measure because minority characteristics may be correlated with productive characteristics. An ideal test of discrimination would examine the effects of an exogenous shock to preferences over ethnicities. This paper draws on opera programs, census records, and food purchases in the United States to show that World War I created such a shock. It introduces a new data set on applications for membership at the New York Stock Exchange between 1883 and 1973 to test whether this shift in tastes worsened the treatment of German-Americans relative to other ethnicities. Applicants for membership at the New York Exchange must pass a subjective test of “personal and financial integrity”. Data on more than 7,000 applications between 1883 and 1973 suggest that the probability that German applicants would be rejected increased by 25 percent relative to Anglo-Saxons after the beginning of the war.

Work in Progress

The Geography of Knowledge

Abstract: Why are some locations more innovative than others? This paper combines nineteenth-century geographic data on the location of innovations, manufacturing workers, and universities with economic, demographic, and social variables to examine the determinants of innovation at the county level. Data are drawn from the records of the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, and from census and marriage records for England, Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales. The paper examines the influence of urbanization, education, as well as ethnic, religious, and industrial diversity on a county’s potential for innovation.

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