William H. Phillips () (Department of Economics, Tulane University)
Abstract
Patenting expanded rapidly across the post bellum South as its transportation network filled in and city growth extended markets. This was consistent with Sokoloff and Khan (1990), who demonstrated the elastic supply of patentable ideas in early America. Successful innovation required that inventors could or did sell their property rights through "assignment" to those who commercialized new technology. The assignment characteristics of 1912 southern patents were examined. Southern "border" state patents had a higher rate of marketable assignments than those issued to residents in the Deep South. Greater commercialization of patents in border state cities accounted for most of this difference.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Tulane University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
0804.