Here are the abstracts of my recent journal articles:
We survey the relevant literature on translation difficulty and automatic evaluation of machine translation (MT) quality and investigate whether source text’s translation difficulty features contain any information about MT quality. We analyse the 2017–2019 Conferences on Machine Translation (WMT) data of machine translation quality of English news text translated to eleven different languages (Chinese, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian, German, Gujarati, Kazakh, Russian, and Turkish). We find (weak) negative correlation between the source text’s length, polysemy and structural complexity and the corresponding human evaluated quality of machine translation. This suggests a potentially important but measureable influence of source text’s translation difficulty on MT quality.
Language Resources and Evaluation, Volume 58, pages 1093–1114, (2024), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10579-024-09735-x. (download)
Language matters, and it is an overwhelming stylized fact that language translation is an unavoidable part of global business. In this paper, we quantify the impact of translation difficulty reflected by the presence of multiplemeaning words in the original text. We focus on international patent applications because patent prosecution is nation-based. An inventor who seeks patent protection in a foreign jurisdiction with a different official language will need to file a translated version of the same document. Our estimates show that applications with more ambiguous original (English) text, are up to 25 percentage points less likely to receive a grant in the non-English jurisdictions (China, Japan, and South Korea). The results suggest that language translation difficulty can serve as a potential source of distortion in the global patent system. Ultimately, such translation difficulty may reduce the level of investment in global innovation activities, potentially leading to significant welfare loss. These findings serve to illustrate why international businesses should have adequate language translation strategy to address any translation difficulty arising from the presence of ambiguous words even when the deal involves the cross-border transfer of highly codified knowledge such as patents.
Journal of International Business Policy, 2023, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s42214-023-00157-0. (download)
This paper estimates the effect of patent pledges, commitments made voluntarily by patent holders to limit the enforcement of their patents, on follow-on inventions. Patent pledges have been gaining popularity in recent years thanks to the highly visible pledges of companies such as Google and Tesla. Extant literature discusses the legal and strategic implications of patent pledges, but we know very little about the societal aspects of such pledges. The empirical analysis exploits original data on over 1200 patents pledged from across technological fields between 2005 and 2017. We implement recent advances in conditional difference-in-differences estimators for staggered, dynamic event study settings to account for unobserved endogenous selection into a patent pledge. We build the matched control group of not-pledged patents using similarity measures of the full text of patent documents. The results suggest that patent pledges spur technological progress, as reflected by increased citations received by the pledged patents. The effect is particularly salient for the more open patent pledges and the higher-quality and more novel patents. The results bear implications for discussions about the role of intellectual property on technology diffusion.
Research Policy, 52 (5), 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2023.104745. (download)
The patent system underpins the business model of some of the fastest-growing companies. Used appropriately, it should support frontier technologies and nurture new firms. Used perniciously, it can stifle innovation and protect established technological behemoths. We analyze patent examination decisions at the American, European, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese patent offices and find evidence that patent attorneys have a surprisingly significant role in the patent system. Our results suggest that some forces within the examination system maintain the uneven playing field by allocating monopoly rights to inventors with better access to influential attorneys, rather than leveling it by favoring inventors with better, nonobvious ideas. Attorney quality is most important, vis-à-vis invention quality, in less codified and more rapidly changing technology areas such as software and ICT.
Journal of Industrial Economics, 71 (1), 2023, 124–142. https://doi.org/10.1111/joie.12319 . (download)
Does the presence of specialist technological expertise, diversity across industries and the intensity of competition among existing firms in a location affect the rate at which new firms are attracted to an agglomeration? We construct three measures of these explanators including a novel measure of competitive dynamics and estimate a region-industry panel fixed-effects model using data on a national census of firms over a 15-year period. This extensive panel dataset of firms and regions, enables us to move beyond the comparative static analysis which has dominated the agglomeration literature for so long. We find local competitive intensity has a large positive effect on firm creation. Competition attracts, not repels. Technological specialisation is a moderate attractee, but diversity may merely lead to local congestion.
Research Policy, 51 (7), 2022. (download)