The recent surge in U.S. patenting and expansion of patentable subject matter has increased patent office backlogs and raised concerns that in some cases patents of insufficient quality or with inadequate search of prior art are being issued. At the same time patent litigation and its costs are...

We report the results of the first comparative study of the determinants and effects of patent oppositions in Europe and of re- examinations on corresponding patents issued in the United States. The analysis is based on a dataset consisting of matched EPO and US patents. Our analysis focuses on...

This paper is an interpretive history of federal support for the American software industry from its beginnings through the 1980s. As in other high-technology cases, federal _ especially defense-related _ support for software was crucial early in the technology's development, but the flow of...

This paper is a first step toward closing the analytical gap in the extensive literature on the results of interactions between public and private R&D expenditures, and their joint effects on the economy. Earlier studies frequently report contradictory estimates of the response of company...

The trickle of business method patents issued by the United States Patent Office became a flood after the State Street Bank decision in 1998. Many scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued both the quality of these patents and the decision itself. This paper discusses the likely impact...

Evidence on the "funding gap" for R&D is surveyed. The focus is on financial market reasons for underinvestment in R&D that persist even in the absence of externality-induced underinvestment. The conclusions are that 1) small and new innovative firms experience high costs of capital that are...

We review the changes in modelling strategy and econometric methodology when estimating a firm-level investment equation on panel data during the past twenty years, in order to assess which of these changes result from new estimation methods and changes in the practice of panel data...

The role of financial institutions and corporate governance in the conduct and performance of industrial firms, especially in the area of technological innovation and international competition has been hotly debated in the recent past. The results presented here are a contribution to the...

This paper surveys recent findings about how the financial markets value the knowledge assets of publicly traded firms. The motivation for using market value equation to price knowledge assets is discusssed and the theory behind this equation is briefly presented. Then the empirical literature...