How The West Has Won: Regional and Industrial Inversion in U.S. Patent Activity

Arbeitspapier

While it is clear that there has been a 'regional inversion' in American patent activity over the past 25 years (i.e. relative rise of the Northwest and Southwest at the expense of the traditional invention hotbeds of the Northeast and Midwest), the reason is still open to speculation. Intuition suggests that it can be explained by some combination of changing demographics and industrial composition. We introduce constant market share analysis (CMSA), typically used only in international trade theory, offering a new extension to this tool, and conclude that industrial shifts have accounted for almost half of the regional inversion. Regression results show how the West capitalized upon the shift using demographics and policy variables, whose importance vary with the planning horizon.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Wellesley College Working Paper ; No. 2002-09

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes ; Technological Change: Government Policy ; General Regional Economics: Econometric and Input-Output Models; Other Models ; Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity ; Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights: General
• Subject: invention ; geography ; clustering ; regional inversion ; constant market share analysis ; Patent ; Regionale Konzentration ; USA

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Johnson, Daniel K.N. ; Brown, Amy
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Wellesley College, Department of Economics
• (where): Wellesley, MA
• (when): 2002

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/23217
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:45 AM CET