. 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 …

We examine the effect of pharmaceutical patent protection on the speed of drug launch, price, and quantity in 60 … countries from 2000-2013. The World Trade Organization required its member countries to implement a minimum level of patent … potential static losses that result from reduced competition during the patent term. We take advantage of the fact that at the …

motives to patent indicate that firms patent for reasons that often extend beyond directly profiting from a patented … motives for patenting include the prevention of rivals from patenting related inventions (i.e., patent blocking'), the use of … patents in negotiations and the prevention of suits. We find that firms commonly patent for different reasons in discrete …

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 …

patent histories and R&D expenditures, after controlling for other firm-specific variables including size and likelihood of …

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 …