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International technological diffusion is a key determinant of cross-country differences in economic performance. While patents can be a useful proxy for innovation and technological change and diffusion, fully exploiting patent data for such economic analyses requires patents to be tied to measures of economic activity. In this paper, we describe and explore a new algorithmic approach to constructing concordances between the International Patent Classification (IPC) system that organizes patents by technical features and industry classification systems that organize economic data, such as the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) and the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC). This ‘Algorithmic Links with Probabilities’ (ALP) approach mines patent data using keywords extracted from industry descriptions and processes the resulting matches using a probabilistic framework. We compare …