This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control...

We model early expectations about the value and technological importance ('quality') of a patented innovation as a latent variable common to a set of four indicators: the number of patent claims, forward citations, backward citations and family size. The model is estimated for four technology...

Since the late 1980s the global intellectual property rights (IPR) system has been strengthening dramatically as much of the developing world introduces patent protection for new drug products. This may lead to more research on drugs to address developing country needs. As there are identifiable...

The decision to require that countries grant product patents for pharmaceutical innovations as a condition of membership in the World Trade Organization was very contentious. Almost 50 developing countries were not granting patent monopolies for drugs during the period the Uruguay round of GATT...

This paper investigates the characteristics of litigated patents by combining for the first" time information about patent case filings from the U.S. district courts and detailed data from the" U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We construct a series of indicators for the factors which the"...

This paper examines the suggestion that established plaintiffs request preliminary injunctions to engage in predation against less financially healthy firms. We first present a model in which differences in litigation costs drive the use of preliminary injunctions in civil litigation. The...

This paper examines several recent avenues of empirical research into the enforcement of" intellectual property rights. To frame these issues, we start with a stylized model of the patent" litigation process. The bulk of the paper is devoted to linking the empirical literature on patent"...

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 improve on counts in studies which require a measure...

Efforts to strengthen the global patent system for pharmaceuticals continue to be controversial, and what will likely be a similarly fraught international debate over price controls has begun. The outcome of international negotiations and the resulting policy decisions made by each country will...