We study the causal impact of invalidating marginally valid patents during post-grant opposition at the European Patent … participation of a patent's original examiner in the opposition division as an instrument. We find a disciplinary effect of … invalidation: Affected inventors file 20% fewer patent applications in the decade after the decision. This effect is entirely …

received over their careers, and employed to highlight the implications of patent institutions for markets in inventions and … for democratization. The United States deliberately created a patent system that differed from existing European systems … in ways that significantly affected the course of technological change. Patent rights in the U.S. helped to define and …

Patent boxes have been heavily debated for their role in corporate tax competition. This paper uses firm-level data for … determinants of patent registration across a large sample of countries. Importantly, we disentangle the effects of corporate income … taxation from the tax advantage of patent boxes. We also exploit a new and original dataset on patent box features such as the …

patentability standards at PTOs (Patent and Trademark Offices awarding so-called bad patents), not only "false innovators" have the … chance of being granted patents but also, and more interestingly, "true innovators" are forced to patent more intensively … distortions caused by bad patents. Moreover, we show that introducing a two-tiered patent system is unlikely to improve market …

. Domestic innovation is measured as citation-weighted domestic patents filed at the European Patent Office (EPO): to account for … to patent at the EPO. Results show that, in the short-run, IPR stimulate innovation. The effect for developing countries …

lower than the social plannerś benchmark, which suggests a role for patent policy. We focus on a "non-infringing inventive … instrument in the form of patent length policy. …

the optimal mix of patent and trade secrets when the innovator faces a strict novelty requirement and can only patent a … innovator can successively patent different fragments of the process. We compare a regime with prior user rights, when the …

Encouraging inventors to disclose new inventions is an important economic justification for the patent system, yet the … technical information contained in patent applications is often inadequate and unclear. This paper proposes a novel approach to … measure disclosure in patent applications using algorithms from computation allinguistics. Borrowing methods from the …

We investigate how international patent activity enables firms from emerging economies to thrive in the global … marketplace. We match Chinese customs data to US patent records, and leverage the quasi-random assignment of USPTO patent … examiners to identify the causal effect of a US patent grant on the subsequent export performance of Chinese firms. Successful …