. The purpose is to document the ways in which patent systems are products of battles over the economic surplus from …-style patent systems with all their imperfections have come to dominate other methods of encouraging inventive activity. The essays …

Patent counts are very imperfect measures of innovative output. This paper discusses how additional data-the number of … years a patent is renewed and the number of countries in which protection for the same invention is sought - can be used to … proposed which may remove half of the noise in patent counts as a measure of innovative output. The paper also illustrates how …

This paper examines three sets of explanations for variations in the strength of patent protection across sixty … countries and a 150-year period. Wealthier nations are more likely to have patent systems, to allow patentees a longer time to … likely to charge higher fees and limit patent protection in some important ways. Countries with democratic political …

pharmaceutical patent protection alone does not stimulate domestic innovation, as estimated by the US patent awards (both raw counts … either. Imports, however, did flourish. Second, national patent law implementation demonstrates conditional importance for … positive relationships with the domestic R&D expenditure and domestic pharmaceutical patent awards in the US. The interaction …

We study the incentives that governments have to protect intellectual property in a trading world economy. We consider … a world economy with ongoing innovation in two countries that differ in market size, in their capacities for innovation … policies in a non-cooperative regime of patent protection, we ask, Why are patents longer in the North? We also study …

and as a patent. Such patent-paper pairs are at the heart of our empirical strategy. We exploit the fact that patents are … knowledge associated with a patent paper pair therefore diffuses within two distinct intellectual property environments -- one …-indifferences estimator for 169 patent-paper pairs (and including a control group of publications from the same journal for which no patent is …

of the developing world introduces patent protection for new drug products. This may lead to more research on drugs to … those already offering such protection the situation offers a unique opportunity to examine the incentive role of patent … provides a baseline' against which future research activity can be compared once the new global patent regime is fully …

It may be advantageous to provide a variety of kinds of patent protection to heterogenous innovations. Innovations … protection in order to be encouraged. We model the problem of designing an optimal patent menu (scope and length) when the … fertility of an innovation in generating more innovations cannot be observed. The menu of patent scope can be implemented with …

Does an expansion of patent scope induce more innovative effort by firms? This article provides evidence on this … question by examining firm responses to the Japanese patent reforms of 1988. Interviews with practitioners suggest the reforms … significantly expanded the scope of patent rights in Japan, but that the average response in terms of additional R&D effort and …