Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/93899 
Year of Publication: 
2010
Series/Report no.: 
SFB/TR 15 Discussion Paper No. 309
Publisher: 
Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio 15 - Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems (GESY), München
Abstract: 
A key input to inventive activity is human capital. Hence it is important to understand the monetary incentives of inventors. We estimate the effect of patented inventions on individual earnings by linking data on U.S. patents and their inventors to Finnish employer-employee data. Returns are heterogeneous: Inventors get a temporary reward of 3% of annual earnings for a patent grant and for highly-cited patents a longer-lasting premium of 30% in earnings three years later. Similar medium-term premia accrue to inventors who initially hold the patent rights, although they forego earnings at the time of the grant.
Subjects: 
citations
effort
incentives
inventors
intellectual property
patents
performance pay
return
wages
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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