The Roots of Agricultural Innovation: Patent Evidence of Knowledge Spillovers

Matthew S. Clancy, Paul Heisey, Yongjie Ji, GianCarlo Moschini

NBER Working Paper No. 27011
Issued in April 2020
NBER Program(s):Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

This chapter investigates the extent to which agricultural innovations draw on ideas originating outside of agriculture. We identify a large set of US patents for agricultural technologies granted between 1976 and 2018. To measure knowledge spillovers to these patents, we rely on three proxies: patent citations to other patents, patent citations to the scientific literature, and a novel text analysis to identify and track new ideas in the patent text. We find that more than half of knowledge flows originate outside of agriculture. The majority of these knowledge inflows, however, still originate in domains that are close to agriculture.

You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.

Supplementary materials for this paper:

• data appendix

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w27011

Forthcoming: The Roots of Agricultural Innovation: Patent Evidence of Knowledge Spillovers, Matt Clancy, Paul Heisey, Yongjie Ji, GianCarlo Moschini. in Economics of Research and Innovation in Agriculture, Moser. 2020