Thomas Schaper

Efficient access to existing knowledge is essential to technical advance, yet little is known about how access-enhancing institutions shape intertemporal knowledge spillovers. In this paper, I investigate the cumulative technological impact of the CNIDR AIDS Database, the first, disease-targeted, online repository of electronic patent documents, launched in 1994. Tracing references from subsequent patents, I find that the marginal impact of the repository was largest (+30%) among patents for which the established disease-link was previously non-obvious to detect through standard bibliographic search, in line with predictions of stronger reduction of internal search costs. Further findings suggest that increased visibility and attention to more "hidden" prior art particularly benefited private sector HIV researchers, and was reflected in enhanced diffusion of technological knowledge across scientific community and geographic boundaries.

Linking scientific articles in PubMed and biomedical U.S. patents assigned to firms, we study the role of scientists active at the knowledge frontier, identified as authors on recent top articles. We expect them to be brokers between new scientific findings and inventions in industry with a high technological impact. We find that inventions made by such “frontier authors” are indeed more impactful and more likely to become breakthroughs, not only compared to those made by non-author inventors, but also compared to inventions from non-top authors and non-recent top authors. We also show that inventions with frontier science as prior art are more impactful. Frontier author patents are more likely to use frontier science as prior art in their inventions and to be first users of such frontier science. Yet, while frontier author patents have a significant impact premium on their non-frontier science prior art patents, their frontier science patents are not particularly more successful compared to frontier science patents from other types of inventors. Our results suggest that closeness to frontier science for use in their inventions is only part of the story of superior impact of frontier scientists, which seems a much broader story.

We investigate the impact of broadband internet diffusion on patenting activity and external knowledge sourcing. Based on exogenous variation in ADSL activation in U.K. between 2000-2007, we find that broadband access increased the number of yearly filed patents by 10-55%, depending on the IV approach. This increase was driven by easier access to geographically distant prior art as evidenced by an increase in the share of references to patents from abroad, and a 2-3 year decline in the average age of these foreign citations. Reassuringly, we do not find similar changes in the references added by patent examiners.

Despite a long and fruitful history of research on competition in economics as well as sociology, extant accounts on the role of competition in society have paid scant attention to its multiplicity: actors tend to be involved in not just one but several competitions at any given point in time. Making use of theoretical resources from sociology and economics, we propose a new conceptual framework for analyzing constellations of multiple competition in the field of science and higher education. In this field, individual academics and collective actors such as universities face heterogeneous—albeit interrelated and even self-reinforcing—forms of competition for scarce goods. The proposed framework may be applied to analyze constellations of multiple competition in diverse societal sectors where competition is only partially coordinated through prices.