British-French Technology Transfer from the Revolution to Louis Philippe (1791–1844): Evidence from Patent Data
利用1791-1844年法国所有专利数据，研究发现英国发明人或与英国发明人有私人联系的法国发明人提交的专利质量更高，表明法国创新体系能有效吸引和吸收英国关键技术。
This paper examines the patterns of technology transfer from Britain to France during the early phases of industrializing using a dataset comprising all patents granted in France in the period 1791–1844. Exploiting the peculiarities of French legislation, we construct an array of patent quality indicators and investigate their determinants. We find that patents filed by British inventors or French inventors with personal connections to British inventors were of relatively higher quality. Overall, our results show that the French innovation system was capable of attracting and effectively absorbing key technologies from Britain.