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A fundamental issue which remains unresolved in the economics of technology is the identification and measurement of R&D spillovers, or the extent to which a firm is able to exploit economically the investment in R&D made by another company. In a 1989 paper in this Review, Adam Jaffe extended his pathbreaking 1986 study measur-ing the total R&D" pool" available for spillovers to identify the contribution of spillovers from university research to" commercial innovation"(Jaffe, 1989 p. 957). Jaffe's findings were the first to identify the extent to which university research spills over into the generation of inventions and innovations by private firms. To measure technological change, Jaffe relies upon the number of patented inventions registered at the US patent office, which he argues is" a proxy for new economically useful knowledge"(Jaffe, 1989 p. 958). In order to relate the response of this measure to R&D …