Increasing evidence indicates that a large share of granted patents are ''undeserved'' because they do not meet the criteria of novelty or non-obviousness. In recent decades, many jurisdictions introduced patent reforms to avoid weak patent applications and improve legal patent quality. In...

US military Research and Development (R&D) expenditures arguably represent the best example of mission-oriented policy. They are sizeable, with a clear-cut public purpose (national defense) and with the government being their exclusive beneficiary. Exploiting a longitudinal dataset linking...

The recent surge of patent disputes plays an important role in discouraging firms from entering new technology domains (TDs). Using a large-scale dataset combining data from the EPO-PATSTAT database and ORBIS-IP and containing patents applied at EPO between 2000 and 2015, we construct a new...

We study the impact of alternative innovation policies on the short- and long-run performance of the economy, as well as on public finances, extending the Schumpeter meeting Keynes agent- based model (Dosi et al., 2010). In particular, we consider market-based innovation policies such as R&D...

Government funding of innovation can have a significant impact not only on the rate of technical change, but also on its direction. In this paper, we examine the role that government grants and government departments played in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an emergent general...

Innovation is one of the usual suspects in defining differences in performance among firms, according to a strong and diverse theoretical framework. Understanding the diversity that exists within the population of innovative firms is essential to elaborate appropriate innovation policies. Our...

By using the PatVal-EU dataset we find that the most important determinant of patent licensing is firm size. Patent breadth, value, protection, and other factors suggested by the literature also have an impact, but not as important. In addition, most of these factors affect the willingness to...

The economic theory of intellectual property rights is based on a rather narrow view of both competition and technological knowledge. We suggest some ways of enriching this framework with a more empirically grounded view of both and, by means of a simulation model, we analyze the impact of...

This paper aims to contribute to frame the IP for development debate into a more extensive discussion on appropriability, within the perspective of policies shaping scientific, technological and production capabilities in the light of development theory. Through the lenses of the paradigm based...

This note discusses the medical/therapeutical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and their “political economy” context. First, the very quick development of several vaccines highlights the richness of the basic knowledge waiting for therapeutical exploitation. Such knowledge has largely...