Business dynamics of innovating firms: Linking U.S. patents with administrative data on workers and firms

This paper discusses the construction of a new longitudinal database tracking inventors and patent owning firms over time. We match granted patents between 2000 and 2011 to administrative databases of firms and workers housed at the U.S. Census Bureau. We use both the patent assignee and inventor information to triangulate the data and improve on patent owner disambiguation. The triangulated database allows us to maximize the match rates while providing validation for a large portion of them. We describe the data construction and explore basic features of the data. We find patenting firms, particularly young patenting firms, disproportionally contribute jobs to the U.S. economy. We find patenting is a relatively rare event among small firms but that most patenting firms are nevertheless small, and that patenting is not as rare an event for the youngest firms compared to the oldest firms. While manufacturing firms tend to patent the most, we find most patenting firms are in the services and wholesale sectors. These new data are a product of a collaboration within the U.S. Department of Commerce, between the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.