We analyse the determinants of the decline in measured research productivity (the patent/Ramp;D ratio)using panel data on manufacturing firms in the U.S. for the period 1980-93. We focus on three factors: the level of demand, the quality of patents, and technological exhaustion. We first develop...

This paper investigates the characteristics of litigated patents by combining for the first time information about patent case filings from the U.S. district courts and detailed data from the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office. A series of indicators is constructed for the factors which the...

This paper investigates the effect of the threat and occurrence of patent litigation on the private value of patent protection. Potential challenges are introduced into a renewal model as a factor in patentee decisions as to whether a patent is worth maintaining. The model yields testable...

Using new data on citations to university patents and scientific publications, and measures of distance based on Google maps, we study how geography affects university knowledge diffusion. We show that knowledge flows from patents are localized in two respects: they decline sharply with distance...

We study how fragmentation of patent rights ('patent thickets') and the formation of the Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affected the duration of patent disputes, and thus the speed of technology diffusion through licensing. We develop a model of patent litigation which predicts...

This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation, reputation and reciprocity in driving open source software innovation. We exploit the observed pattern of contributions – the ‘revealed preference' of developers - to infer the underlying incentives. Using detailed information on code...

We study the impact of incentive pay, local development objectives and government constraints on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for...

When firms have different Ramp;D productivities, it may be welfare increasing to differentiate patent lives across inventions. The reason is that the uniform patent life provides excessive incentives to do Ramp;D to the low productivity firms and insufficient incentives to high productivity...

Strategic patenting is widely believed to raise the costs of innovating, especially in industries characterised by cumulative innovation. This paper studies the effects of strategic patenting on Ramp;D, patenting and market value in the computer software industry. We focus on two key aspects:...

We show that economic incentives affect the commercial value of inventions generated in universities. Using data for 102 U.S. universities during the period 1991-1999, we find that universities which give higher royalty shares to academic scientists generate higher license income, controlling...