ABSTRACT
Patent families are created as firms take steps to secure intellectual property over a variety of regimes. They provide a measure of patenting activity which emphasizes scope rather than duration. Here, the idea is used to construct a patent activity variable for firms in the UK scientific instruments industry over the period 1981-90. This variable is considered along with size and financial variables for the same firms over the period 1983-90. The database so created is an unbalanced panel for 92 firms in this patent-intensive industry.1 As all the significant firms in the industry are included, a fixed effects, rather than random effects, model is used for estimation on this database.2 The core of the empirical analysis in this chapter is a set of estimates which seek the principal determinants of patenting activity in size and financial variables.
