By drawing information from a survey of inventors of 9,017 European patents (PatVal-EU), this paper provides novel and detailed data about the characteristics of the European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations among researchers and...

This paper studies the determinants of the quantity and quality of inventors’ patents. It uses a sample of 793 inventors drawn from the PatVal-EU dataset and the information on EPO patents that they contributed to inventing during the period 1988-1998. It explores three aspects of the...