آیا شاخص های علمی با کیفیت حق ثبت اختراع برای سرمایه گذاران مفید است؟

Together with the number of patents and the value of R&D expenditures, scientific measures of patent quality give investors a useful basis upon which to judge the economic merit of the firm's inventive and innovative activity. Especially in the case of small cap and relatively low P/E high tech companies, we find a favorable stock-price influence when both the number of patents, the scientific merit of those patents, and R&D spending is high. Patent quality information also appears germane in the case of large cap high-tech companies with relatively high P/E ratios. In short, patent citation information may indeed help investors judge the future profit-earning potential of a firm's scientific discoveries.

Stock-price effects of corporate research and development (R&D) expenditures have been used to provide useful, albeit indirect, evidence on the economic consequences of the firm's inventive and innovative activity. For example, Chan et al. (2001) report that companies with relatively high R&D intensity tend to earn large excess returns. In a similar vein, Sundaram et al. (1996) show that corporate research and development (R&D) spending announcements have predictably positive effects on the market value of the firm. These “predictive studies” document the ability of R&D expenditures to forecast future stockholder returns.

Investors often face the problem of making sensible judgments about future earnings prospects for high-tech companies with only limited earnings, revenue or book value information. This is especially true for high-tech companies with R&D programs that yield hard-to-evaluate patent output. This paper builds upon recent research to suggest the potential for scientific measures of patent quality as useful indicators of the future earnings potential for high-tech firms. On an overall basis, we find that various scientific measures of patent quality have positive and statistically significant effects on stock prices.