TY - JOUR AU - Forman, Chris AU - Goldfarb, Avi AU - Greenstein, Shane TI - Information Technology and the Distribution of Inventive Activity JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 20036 PY - 2014 Y2 - April 2014 DO - 10.3386/w20036 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20036 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20036.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Chris Forman Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management Warren Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853-6201 E-Mail: chris.forman@cornell.edu Avi Goldfarb Rotman School of Management University of Toronto 105 St. George Street Toronto, ON M5S 3E6 CANADA Tel: 416/946-8604 Fax: 416/978-5433 E-Mail: agoldfarb@rotman.utoronto.ca Shane Greenstein Technology Operation and Management Morgan Hall 439 Harvard Business School Soldiers Field Boston, MA 02163 Tel: 617/384-7472 E-Mail: sgreenstein@hbs.edu M1 - published as Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, Shane Greenstein. "Information Technology and the Distribution of Inventive Activity," in Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin F. Jones, editors, "The Changing Frontier: Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy" University of Chicago Press (2015) M3 - presented at "The Changing Frontier:", August 2-3, 2013 AB - We examine the relationship between the diffusion of advanced internet technology and the geographic concentration of invention, as measured by patents. First, we show that patenting became more concentrated from the early 1990s to the early 2000s and, similarly, that counties that were leaders in patenting in the early 1990s produced relatively more patents by the early 2000s. Second, we compare the extent of invention in counties that were leaders in internet adoption to those that were not. We see little difference in the growth rate of patenting between leaders and laggards in internet adoption, on average. However, we find that the rate of patent growth was faster among counties who were not leaders in patenting in the early 1990s but were leaders in internet adoption by 2000, suggesting that the internet helped stem the trend towards more geographic concentration. We show that these results are largely driven by patents filed by distant collaborators rather than non-collaborative patents or patents by non-distant collaborators, suggesting low cost long-distance digital communication as a potential mechanism. ER -