Modeling the Duration of Patent Examination at theEuropean Patent Office

We analyze the duration of the patent examination process at the EuropeanPatent Office (EPO). Our data contain information related to the patent’seconomic and technical relevance, EPO capacity and workload as well as novelcitation measures which are derived from the EPO’s search reports. In our multivariateanalysis we estimate competing risk specifications in order to characterizedifferences in the processes leading to a withdrawal of the application by the applicant,a refusal of the patent grant by the examiner or an actual patent grant.Highly cited applications are approved faster by the EPO than less importantones, but they are also withdrawn less quickly by the applicant. The processduration increases for all outcomes with the application’s complexity, originality,number of references (backward citations) in the search report and with theEPO’s workload at the filing date. Endogenous applicant behavior becomes apparentin other results: more controversial claims lead to slower grants, but fasterwithdrawals, while relatively well-documented applications (identified by a highshare of applicant references appearing in the search report) are approved fasterand take longer to be withdrawn....