Abstract
This article details the construction of a firm-year panel dataset combining the NBER patent dataset with the Survey of Industrial R&D conducted by the Census Bureau and National Science Foundation. The dataset constitutes a platform that offers an unprecedented view of the R&D-to-patenting innovation process and a close analysis of the strengths and limitations of the R&D survey. The files are linked through a name-matching algorithm customized for uniting the firm names to which patents are assigned with the firm names in the Census Bureau’s SSEL business registry. Through the Census Bureau’s file structure, R&D can be linked to the operating performances of each firm’s establishments, further facilitating innovation-to-productivity studies.
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Notes
For more information see http://www.compustat.com.
For more information see http://www.webserver02.ces.census.gov/index.php/ces/1.00/researchguidelines.
Available at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics.
Patent records are also available prior to 1975 without the inventor name and citation information.
Only the last trailer is removed in Step 4 (e.g., ‘USA’ in this example). The next-to-last trailer is removed in Step 6 (e.g., ‘COMPANY’ in this example). This two-step process, separated by Step 5’s removal of the apostrophe punctuation marker, improved overall performance of the algorithm with foreign firm names and name abbreviations.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Jim Davis, Lucia Foster, Adela Luque, and Francisco Moris for assistance on this project. The research in this article was conducted while the authors were Special Sworn Status Researchers of the US Census Bureau at the Boston Census Research Data Center. Research results and conclusions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Census Bureau. This article has been reviewed to ensure that confidential data are not revealed.
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Kerr, W.R., Fu, S. The survey of industrial R&D—patent database link project. J Technol Transfer 33, 173–186 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-007-9078-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-007-9078-3