century. In addition to the funding agency, the data report whether the government has title to the patent ("title" patents …) or funded a patent assigned to a private organization ("license" patents). The data include a large number of "license …" patents that cannot be linked to government funding from patent text or other sources. Combining the historical data with …

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 …

We estimate the effect of patent protection on follow-on investments in corporate scientific research. We exploit a new … method for identifying an exogenous reduction in the protection a granted patent provides. Using data on public, research …-active firms between 1990 and 2015, we find that firms decrease follow-on research after a reduction in patent protection, as …

How do non-practicing entities ("Patent Trolls") impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question …", who exploit the patent system to extract rents and thereby hurt innovation. We employ unprecedented access to NPE …-derived patent and financial data, as well as a novel model that guides our data analysis. We find that NPEs acquire patents from …

A patent only protects an innovator from others producing the same product, but it does not protect him from others … within-patent competition, which results from production of the same product, and betweenpatent competition, which results … effects of intellectual property regulations on within -patent competition by showing how protecting innovative returns from …

. 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 …