This paper develops a methodology to compare the quality of examination services across patent offices. Quality is … defined as the extent to which patent offices comply with their patentability conditions in a transparent way. The methodology … patent offices in Europe (EPO), Japan (JPO) and the US (USPTO) shows that their operational designs differ substantially: the …

The present paper discusses the role of quality in patent systems from the perspective of patent offices' behavior and … organization. After documenting original stylized facts, the paper presents a model in which patent offices set patent fees and the … quality level of their examination processes. Various objectives of patent offices' governors are considered. We show that the …

This paper presents a quality index for patent systems. The index is composed of nine operational design components … that help shape the transparency of patent systems and affect the extent to which they comply with patentability conditions … two factors measure patent offices’ resource allocation (i.e., workload per examiner and incentives). The index is …

This paper assesses the impact of adopting a post-grant review institution in the US patent system by comparing the … “opposition careers” of European Patent Office (EPO) equivalents of litigated US patents to those of a control group of EPO … employing these different methods in our data analysis. We find that EPO equivalents of US litigated patent applications are …

This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are … usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the … former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inelastic good …

importantly, unobservable patent specific heterogeneity in the responsiveness of patent location to tax. Our results suggest that … substantial heterogeneity in responses. We simulate the impact of recent reforms that apply a lower tax rate to patent income …, finding that they attract patent income but result in losses in government revenues. …