Technology Flows Matrix Estimation Revisited

The results, extended to analyze how technology flows affected productivity growth in the 1960s and 1970s, are reported in Scherer (1982a, 1982b, and 1984). In this paper, the author returns to the scene of the crime two decades later to see whether the desired matrix of technology flows could have been obtained using publicly available information, or information that could be gleaned as a byproduct of existing surveys, without a costly effort extracting microdata from a large sample of individual invention patents.