Cliometric Approaches to Creativity: Patents, Prizes, Copyrights, and Trademarks

This chapter surveys recent cliometric research on technological and cultural creativity in Europe and the United States between 1750 and 1930. Empirical analyses of patents, prizes, copyrights, and trademarks have added to our knowledge of the nature and sources of inventive activity and cultural innovation and their impact on economic growth. Far more attention has been directed toward patents and the economic history of technological change, resulting in more conclusive findings. In the United States, property rights in patented inventions facilitated markets in ideas and ensured that returns were aligned with productivity and market demand. European growth models assumed useful knowledge was scarce and limited to special groups, so an array of administered rights and rewards were directed to elites and “great inventions.” Nonmarket-oriented incentives such as innovation prizes typically failed as inducements for inventive activity and were associated with rent-seeking and governance problems. An increasing number of studies examine copyrights and trademarks, but their general conclusions are less evident, suggesting a need for more empirical attention to cultural markets. This extensive body of research underlines that quantitative analysis is only as good as the underlying data, that credible conclusions require close attention to variation in institutional details, and that excellence in cliometrics requires both good economics and good history.