Job Market Paper 

Pre-Grant Patents and Innovation Diffusion

Abstract: Are pre‐grant patent filings effective forward‐looking “news” signals for global innovation diffusion? Using a novel 1980–2019 panel of pre‐grant patent filing counts and trade data for 21 economies (17 OECD + 4 BRICS), I construct an import–share–weighted index of filed patents and instrument it with a Bartik shift–share of partner‐country filed patent‐counts to isolate exogenous trade‐driven shocks. I also build an analogous granted‐patent index for comparison. Panel local projections show that trade‐driven pre‐grant shocks, while slower to materialize, generate larger long‐run TFP gains than granted-patent shocks and produce stronger, more immediate equity‐market reactions. At the sector level, shocks to the filed‐patent index boost manufacturing TFP and R & D capital within one year and sustain growth thereafter; heterogeneous analysis shows that countries with more R & D-intensive manufacturing sectors experience even larger TFP gains. These results demonstrate the power of pre‐grant filings as early predictors of innovation spillovers and underscore the need to align trade and R & D policies to maximize long‐run productivity gains.

Presented at (*: scheduled): *National Institute of Economic and Social Research Brown Bag Seminar, NWSSDTP PhD Conference (2025); Macroeconomics Research Unit Seminar Series, University of Kwazulu-Natal (2025)

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