innovation. We exploit the observed pattern of contributions - the 'revealed preference' of developers - to infer the underlying …

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow-on innovation …. Patent rights appear to block follow-on innovation only in the technology fields of computers, electronics and medical …? This paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related …

We analyse the determinants of the decline in measured research productivity (the patent/R&D ratio) using panel data on … technological exhaustion. We first develop an index of patent ‘quality’ using detailed information on patents in the US in seven … technology fields. Using a factor model, we construct a minimum-variance index based on four patent characteristics and show that …

patent lives when firms have different R&D productivities. A uniform patent life provides excessive R&D incentive to low …-productivity firms, and too little to high ones. The optimally differentiated patent scheme can be implemented through a menu of patent … with existing patent renewal systems and to illustrate the potential welfare gains from the optimal policy. …

We study how the market for innovation affects enforcement of patent rights. Conventional wisdom associates the gains … from trade with comparative advantage in manufacturing or marketing. We show that these gains imply that patent … transactions should increase litigation risk. We identify a new source of gains from trade, comparative advantage in patent …

This paper shows that the process of enforcing patent rights both dilutes and distorts Research and Development (R …&D) incentives. We examine the characteristics of litigated patents by combining, for the first time, information about patent case … filings from the US district courts with detailed data from the US Patent and Trademark Office. By comparing filed cases to a …

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries … duration and content of patent and price control regimes. Price regulation strongly delays launch, while longer and more … extensive patent protection accelerates it. Health policy institutions, and economic and demographic factors that make markets …

cumulative innovation. This paper studies the effects of strategic patenting on R&D, patenting and market value in the computer … software industry. We focus on two key aspects: patent portfolio size which affects bargaining power in patent disputes, and … the fragmentation of patent rights ('patent thickets') which increases the transaction costs of enforcement. We develop a …