Financial factors and patents

Abstract

This paper conjectures that equity supply is crucial for firms in order to maintain a smooth patenting profile through time. This hypothesis is tested on Swedish firm-level observations from 1997 to 2005. Patent applications growth in Sweden has been highly volatile in recent years. During the economic downturn, following the burst of the IT-bubble, applications dropped substantially, but results here show that the downturn had little effect on the patenting of high-equity firms. Instead, the entire decline in patent applications is confined to firms with lower levels of equity. This effect is consistent across sectors, firm-size, corporate-affiliation, and human-capital intensity.