firms may protect their inventions by means of intellectual property rights, such as patents. By taking out a patent … of patents on the dissemination of R&D findings is, however, insignificant. Therefore, we conclude that patent … functioning of the contemporary patent system. We find that patenting firms are being less confronted with imitation. The effect …

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 opposition at the European Patent Office. We find that patent invalidation …

We use exogenous variation in the strength of trade secrets protection to show that a relative weakening of patents …

representative panel data set of firms in Germany from 2002-2016, complemented by detailed geographic information of patent activity …

software patents in the U.S. on the publications of university researchers in the field of computer science. Difference … quality) than their European counterparts after patent rights for software inventions were introduced. We then introduce a …