We use exogenous variation in the strength of trade secrets protection to show that a relative weakening of patents (compared to trade secrets) has a disproportionately negative effect on the disclosure of processes - inventions that are not otherwise visible to society. We develop a structural...

Pharmaceutical firms typically enjoy market exclusivity for new drugs from concurrent protection of the underlying invention (through patents) and the clinical trials data submitted for market approval (through data exclusivity). Patent invalidation during drug development renders data...

We study the causal impact of invalidating marginally valid patents during post-grant opposition at the European Patent Office on affected inventors' subsequent patenting. We exploit exogenous variation in invalidation by leveraging the participation of a patent's original examiner in the...

We investigate the causal effect of patent rights on cumulative innovation, using large-scale data that approximate the patent universe in its technological and economic variety. We introduce a novel instrumental variable for patent invalidation that exploits personnel scarcity in post-grant...

We document the occurrence of process claims in granted U.S. patents over the last century. Using novel data on the type of independent patent claims, we show an increase in the annual share of process claims of about 25 percentage points (from below 10% in 1920). This rise in process intensity...

Firms use a variety of practices to disclose the knowledge generated by their R&D activities, including, but not limited to, publishing findings in scientific journals, patenting new technologies, and contributing to developing standards. While the individual effects of engaging in the listed...

How do intellectual property rights influence academic science? We investigate the consequences of the introduction of software patents in the U.S. on the publications of university researchers in the field of computer science. Difference-in-difference estimations reveal that software scientists...

From a firm’s perspective two competing forces are driving the decision to invest in innovation. On the one hand, innovative performance is an important driver of profitability and growth. On the other hand, investments in innovation suffer from negative externalities, i.e. spillovers to other...

We explore the tail of patented invention value distributions by using value estimates obtained directly from patent holders. The paper focuses on those full-term German patents of the application year 1977 which were held by West German and U.S. residents. The most valuable patents in our data...