Industrial designs and firm performance: evidence from publicly traded Canadian companies, 1990–2014
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Industrial designs (IDs) are a specialized type of intellectual property that protects a product's form and presentational features, giving it uniqueness that differentiates it from other products. This paper estimates the effect on firm revenue and profitability of holding IDs. Using a unique data set linking Canadian ID holdings with Canadian publicly traded firms over the years 1990-2014, the authors use two methods to identify a positive association between holding IDs and firm revenue per employee and net income per employee. We contribute to the literature on IDs by introducing controls for patenting, R&D spending, and time-varying sector effects. To determine the marginal effect of each additional ID held, we use a fixed effects regression and find that a 1% increase in the stock of IDs increases revenue per employee by 0.19%. With a nearest-neighbor matching approach, we find a 10% total premium in revenue per employee and a 20% premium in net income per employee among firms holding at least one ID, compared to those with none.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".