Fabio Montobbio

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

This paper is a critical review of the empirical literature resulting from recent years of debate and analysis regarding technology and employment and the future of work as threatened by technology, outlining both lessons learned and challenges ahead. We distinguish three waves of studies and relate their heterogeneous findings to the choice of tec...

This article represents one of the first attempts at building a direct measure of occupational exposure to robotic labour‐saving technologies. After identifying robotic and labour‐saving robotic patents, the underlying 4‐digit CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification) code definitions, together with O*NET (Occupational Information Network) task descr...

This paper investigates the presence of explicit labour-saving heuristics within robotic patents. It analyses innovative actors engaged in robotic technology and their economic environment (identity, location, industry), and identifies the technological fields more exposed to labour-saving innovations. It exploits advanced natural language processi...

We investigate the impact of the 2008 crisis to study the relationship between economic and technological resilience in 248 European Union regions. For economic resilience we measure the difference between the level of unemployment rate before crisis and the level of unemployment rate at its peak after the crisis-i.e., the unemployment resistance....

Novelty indicators are increasingly important for science policy. This paper challenges the indicators of novelty as an atypical combination of knowledge (Uzzi et al., 2013) and as the first appearance of a knowledge combination (Wang et al., 2017). We exploit a sample of 230,854 articles (1985 - 2005), published on 8 journals of the American Physi...

We extend the results in Lissoni et al. (2013, J. Econ. Behav. Organ., 95, 49–69) on scientific credit misallocation, as measured by misalignment between authorship and inventorship recognition in patent-publication pairs. Extending the analysis to European data, we confirm that, other things being equal, the probability of exclusion of a scientifi...

Our study analyzes the patent transactions of the top 58 US universities in the yeas from 2002 to 2010. We find that 37.0% of the patents granted at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) have been involved in a form of monetization. Among them, 29.7% have been licensed out, 5.9% have been reassigned to other universities, National L...

This paper explores the effects of geographical distance on knowledge spillovers through patent citations across 270 European regions. Despite decreasing transport and communication costs, geographical distance effects are strong and not decreasing. To address this distance puzzle, we distinguish between the extensive margin (the number of cited te...

We study the evolution of topics in economics and their geographical specialization by analyzing 13,233 papers from seven top journals between 1985 and 2012 and their forward citations. The share of U.S. publications declines from 75% to 64% with a corresponding increase of the European share from 12% to 24%. We use topic modeling and document the...

This paper studies the effects of skilled migration on innovation –proxied by patent citations- in European industries between 1994 and 2005, using the French and the UK Labour Force Surveys and the German Microcensus. Highly-educated migrants have a positive effect on innovation, but the effect differs across industries. It is stronger in industri...

This paper describes the interregional and international mobility of inventors in Italy and estimates its impact on total factor productivity (TFP) at the regional level for the period 1996–2011. A new database of mobile inventors is constructed and, using a set of geographically based instruments to address endogeneity, it shows that inventor in-...

This paper studies whether environmental management systems can spur eco-innovation, analyzing EMAS (Eco-Management and Audit Scheme) adoption and patented innovations (at the European Patent Office) at firm level. It uses an original panel database of 30 439 European firms belonging to all sectors from 2003 to 2012. An original instrumental variab...

This paper uses the French and the UK Labour Force Surveys and German Microcensus to estimate the effects of the different components of the labour force on innovation at the sectoral level between 1994 and 2005. We use various instrumental variable identification strategies and show that high skilled migration has positive effect on innovation eve...

This paper studies international knowledge flows looking at: (i) patent citations that track codified knowledge and (ii) technological collaborations between inventors that gauge knowledge transmitted through face to face contacts. It uses a gravity model for 13 countries (Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China, South Africa, Mexico, the USA, the...

The paper compares the value and impact of academic patents in five European countries with different institutional frameworks : Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden. An academic patent is defined as such when at least one university professor appears among its inventors, irrespective of ownership. Most academic patents are assigned...

This paper uses the French and the UK Labour Force Surveys and the German Microcensus to estimate the effects of different components of the labour force on innovation at the sectoral level between 1994 and 2005. The authors focus, in particular, on the contribution of migrant workers. We adopt a production function approach in which we control for...

The paper compares the value and impact of academic patents in five European countries with different institutional frameworks: Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden. An academic patent is defined as such when at least one university professor appears among its inventors, irrespective of ownership. Most academic patents are assigned t...

Cappelli R. and Montobbio F. European integration and knowledge flows across European regions, Regional Studies. Using data on inventor citations and inventor collaborations, changes in geographical patterns of knowledge flows between European regions during the period 1981-2000 are analysed. It is shown that inventor collaborations become less geo...

Background: Authorship and inventorship are the key attribution rights that contribute to a scientist's reputation and professional achievement. This article discusses the concepts of coinventorship and coauthorship in the legal and sociological literature, as well as journals' publication guidelines and technology transfer offices' recommendation...

Authorship and inventorship are “attribution rights” upon which individual scientists build their reputation and career. Social and legal norms concerning their distribution within research teams are currently criticized for failing to inform third parties on individual contributions. We examine the case of teams engaged in the “double disclosure”...

This paper studies the nature, sources and determinants of international patenting activity in Latin American countries (LACs) and examines the extent to which LACs benefit from R&D that is performed in the G-5 countries (France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States). By using patents and patent citations from the United States...

The article examines the determinants of scientific productivity (number of articles and journals' impact factor) for a panel of about 3600 French and Italian academic physicists active in 2004--2005. Endogeneity problems concerning promotion and productivity are addressed by specifying a generalized Tobit model, in which a selection probit equatio...

This paper estimates the international diffusion of technical knowledge using patent citations. We control for self-citations and for procedural differences between patent offices using equivalent patents. We find that (1) there are clear biases in patent examination processes that generate citations in the two offices; (2) at the EPO there is a st...

Thispaperestimatesthediffusionandobsolescenceoftechnologicalknowledgebytechnologi- calfield, country and type of institution using patent citations. We estimate patent citation-lag distributions from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and from the European Patent Office (EPO). We show that absorptive capacity, and notonly technological op...

The paper examines the determinants of scientific productivity (number of articles and journals’ impact factor) for a panel of about 3600 French and Italian academic physicists active in 2004-05. Endogeneity problems concerning promotion and productivity are addressed by specifying a generalized Tobit model, in which a selection probit equation acc...

This chapter introduces some of the most salient aspects of the debate regarding the relationships between stronger intellectual property rights (IPRs) regimes, innovation, and development. Despite increased knowledge on the subject, little is known on the relationships between IPRs, innovation, and growth, especially as developing countries are co...

Authorship and inventorship are attribution rights that contribute to the reputation of individual scientists, but have to be distributed across several individuals, due to the importance of teamwork in both science and technology. For academic teams that both publish and patent their research results, we can compare the social and legal norms that...

This paper analyses the relative effects of national and international, intra-sectoral and intersectoral spillovers on innovative activity in six large, industrialized countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and US) over the period 1981-1995. We use patent applications at the European Patent Office to measure innovation and their citations to...

In this paper we provide an introduction to some of the most salient aspects of the debate regarding the relationships between stronger intellectual property rights (IPRs) regimes and innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. We emphasize that, despite increased knowledge on the subject, little is known on the relationships between IPRs, innovatio...

This paper studies the patterns of innovation in the ICT field using patents and patent citations. It provides an original methodology to identify ICT applications using patent abstracts and selecting the most frequent sequential triples of words without any a priori selection of keywords. This paper shows that the set of IPC classes related to ICT...

This paper estimates the process of diffusion and decay of knowledge from university, public laboratories and corporate patents in six countries and tests the differences across countries and across technological fields using data from the European Patent Office. It finds that university and public research patents are more cited relatively to comp...

Based on longitudinal data for a matched sample of 592 Italian academic inventors and controls, the paper explores the impact of patenting on university professors’ scientific productivity, as measured by publication and citation counts. Academic inventors (university professors who appear as designated inventors on at least one patent application)...

The paper examines the most recent empirical studies on the impact of university patenting on the economics of public research. Most contributions discuss the controversial effects of the Bayh-Dole Act in the US, or attempt to measure the scope of university patenting in Europe. We highlight two main research lines. The first one deals with the pos...

The paper contributes to ongoing debate on the relationship between publishing and patenting in university. By applying event history analysis to patent and publication data for a sample of Italian academic scientists, we show that more productive scientists are more likely to become academic inventors, to no detriment of their orientation towards...

This chapter addresses the issue of university patenting and its impact on the scientific activity of academic researchers. The issue is highly debated in Europe where legislators are trying to design policy instruments to support the technological transfer from university to industry and to create an optimal set of incentives to stimulate scientis...

Governments and regional authorities often express the belief that the key to prosperity and economic expansion is related to the ability of countries to sustain regional clusters of competitiveness and innovation. The book reviews the most important conceptual approaches to the analysis of the emergence, growth and evolution of clusters of innovat...

We investigate the scientific productivity of Italian academic inventors, namely academic researchers designated as inventors on patent applications to the European Patent Office, 1978-1999. We use a new longitudinal data set comprising 299 academic inventors, and as many matching controls (non-patenting researchers). We enquire whether a trade-off...

This paper focuses on nine large developing countries. Structural decomposition analysis shows that they tend to concentrate innovative activities in industries stagnating at the world level; international trends partly offset national improvements in patent shares. The same occurs for world export shares, although countries display greater adaptat...

The paper presents an empirical study on the relationship between academic researchers' patenting and publishing activities, based upon a sample of patent applications and scientific papers authored by Italian university professors. By treating patents as discrete events punctuating professors' routine publishing activity over time, we conclude tha...

This paper provides a quantitative picture of structural change in innovative activities in four leading sectors ?chemicals, pharmaceuticals, electronics and machinery ?in Europe, United States and Japan and suggests an interpretative framework for explaining the differential rates of innovation among and within these sectors. This framework claims...

This paper estimates the diffusion and obsolescence of technological knowledge by technological field, country and type of institutions that generates it. We use two comparable samples of patents and patent citations from the NBER U.S. Patent Citations Dataset (based on patents from the US Patent Office) and from the EP Cespri Dataset (based on pat...

Introduction: It is generally accepted that governments have an important role to play in fostering the conditions supporting innovation and competitiveness. The economic and political discourse on these issues reflects existing political debates about the capacities of firms and the market mechanisms to deliver desired outcomes. For about forty y...

Introduction: This chapter aims to analyze the determinants of European industrial strength in a selected number of sectors vis-à-vis the United States and Japan. We take a comparative bottom-up approach, presenting a series of results from the analysis of the six sectors (pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, chemicals, telecommunications, software,...

Introduction: The purpose of this chapter is to provide some aggregate evidence on the differences among sectors in terms of innovative activities and trends of relevant economic variables, such as value added, employment and labor productivity. It draws an aggregate picture in terms of stylized facts and open issues, with a specific focus on the s...

We begin with an overview of innovation in services using two existing data-sets. In Chapter 2 we compare the extent and orientation of innovation in services and manufacturers across Europe using the Innobarometer survey. In Chapter 3 we draw on the second European Community Innovation Survey (CIS-2) and look primarily at patterns of innovation wi...

This paper examines the emergence of technologies, applications and platforms in the area of information and communication technologies (ITC), using patent data. It detects new technologies/applications/products using patents' abstracts and describes them looking at their degree of "hybridisation", in terms of technological domains and knowledge ba...

This paper analyses the relative effects of national, international, sectoral and intersectoral spillovers on innovative activity in six large, industrialized countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and US) over the period 1981-1995. This is done controlling for firm level effects and accounting for spillovers from universities and public inst...

This paper selects endogenously 149 relevant technologies or plaff’orms in the ICT field through a browsing procedure of patents abstract. Innovative products and applications in emerging and non emerging technologies are compared. This paper shows that emerging technologies are more concentrated across countries, firms and technological IPC classe...

We define international technological specialisation (ITS) as the technological performance of a country in a specific technology relative to its overall international technological performance. This paper uses patent applications and patent citations at the European Patent Office for five countries (US, UK, Italy, France, Germany) from 1989 to 199...

This paper focuses on a selected number of OECD countries and manufacturing sectors and shows the importance of sectoral diversity in the innovative process and in the relation between technology and world market share dynamics. The econometric exercise confirms the importance of technological variables in the relation with world market shares in t...

This paper analyses the determinants of structural change and aggregate productivity growth on the basis of the aggregation of the behaviours of heterogeneous firms in different economic sectors. At the same time this model accounts for the evolution of market structures by providing a consistent generalisation of standard replicator dynamic models...

This paper is a first attempt towards the full inclusion of a group of variables greatly studied in the current literature on innovation and industrial economics -such as knowledge links and the structure of competition and collaboration in a sector -into the determinants of the international technological specialization of countries. In particular...

The interaction between the sectoral composition of the economy, the scientific and technological research activity of firms and universities, and the activity of large firms is considered as a crucial factor of growth in the advanced countries. This paper enquires about the relationship between the dynamics of international technological specializ...

The paper examines the most recent empirical studies on the impact of university patenting on the economics of public research. Most contributions discuss the controversial effects of the Bayh-Dole Act in the US, or attempt to measure the scope of university patenting in Europe. We highlight two main research lines. The first one deals with the pos...

This paper tests the impact of the reinforcement of IPRs, and in particular of the TRIPS agreement, on technological collaborations between emerging and advanced countries using international patent databases (EPO and USPTO). Technological collaborations generate knowledge flows between inventors through interpersonal and face to face contacts. Thi...