Can investors learn from patent documents? Evidence from textual analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper examines the role of patent texts in the stock market valuation of patents. Utilizing the large language model BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to summarize contextual information within patent texts, I find that patent texts explain 31.5% of the variation in the stock market valuation of patents and provide large incremental explanatory power beyond other structured patent characteristics, firm characteristics, and technological trends. Additionally, patent texts significantly predict the level, volatility, and cumulation speed of future earnings, suggesting they contain genuine information about firms' performance. However, investors do not fully incorporate such information within patent texts into stock prices, as evidenced by the predictive power of patent texts for future stock returns. This underreaction is diminished after the pre‐grant publication of patent applications is mandated. My findings underscore the value of patent texts as a source of information on internally developed intangibles and have implications for academics, practitioners, and regulators.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.137 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".