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 …

We study the evolution of patenting in China from 1985-2019. We use a Large Language Model to measure patent importance … based on patent abstracts and classify patent ownership using a comprehensive business registry. We highlight four insights …. First, average patent importance declined from 2000-2010 but has increased more recently. Second, private Chinese firms …

How does antitrust enforcement against patent-based monopolies affect innovation? I address this question by … ordered to license all its copier-technology patents in the US and abroad. I show that this promoted innovation by other firms … available for licensing. This positive effect is driven by increased innovation by Japanese competitors. They started developing …

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 is not limited to a few patent classes but can be observed across a … shorter than product claims; but this gap has narrowed since the 1970s. These patterns suggest that the patent breadth and …

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 …

. Where licensing fails, follow-on innovation is blocked unless firms gain FTO through patent invalidation. Using large …We study the blocking effect of patents on follow-on innovation by others. We posit that follow-on innovation requires … freedom to operate (FTO), which firms typically obtain through a license from the patentee holding the original innovation …