development. Evidence from the failed Industrial Revolution in 14th-century China illustrates the empirical relevance of the …

This paper investigates the effect of the threat and occurrence of patent litigation on the private value of patent … protection. Potential challenges are introduced into a renewal model as a factor in patentee decisions as to whether a patent is … worth maintaining. The model yields testable predictions about renewal probabilities. Data for post WWII German patents …

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 …

panels of UK and US firms matched to patent data we show that UK firms who had established a high proportion of US …

particular countries to file for non-resident patents in specific foreign economies. Our major contribution is to show that, in … file for patent protection in focal foreign economies where their regional peers and, to a lesser extent, competitors from … economies with similar export product structures have filed for a larger number of patents. …

technological exhaustion. We first develop an index of patent ‘quality’ using detailed information on patents in the U.S. in seven …We analyse the determinants of the decline in measured research productivity (the patent/R&D ratio) using panel data on … manufacturing firms in the U.S. for the period 1980-93. We focus on three factors: the level of demand, the quality of patents, and …

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 …

When firms have different R&D productivities, it may be welfare increasing to differentiate patent lives across … inventions. The reason is that any uniform patent life provides excessive incentives to do R&D to the low productivity firms and … endogenously determine an optimal pattern of patent lives. We characterise the optimal pattern of patent life-spans and show how it …