of the developing world introduces patent protection for new drug products. This may lead to more research on drugs to … those already offering such protection the situation offers a unique opportunity to examine the incentive role of patent … might enhance, or dampen, a firm's responsiveness to the availability of product patents. The picture presented here …

industries where patents are traded less frequently. Our findings are consistent with a stylized model whereby patent protection …We estimate the effect of patent protection on follow-on investments in corporate scientific research. We exploit a new … method for identifying an exogenous reduction in the protection a granted patent provides. Using data on public, research …

firms. Our focus is on the tradeoffs between using patents and disclosing versus the use of secrecy, although we also look …

fertility of an innovation in generating more innovations cannot be observed. The menu of patent scope can be implemented with …It may be advantageous to provide a variety of kinds of patent protection to heterogenous innovations. Innovations … protection in order to be encouraged. We model the problem of designing an optimal patent menu (scope and length) when the …

Does an expansion of patent scope induce more innovative effort by firms? This article provides evidence on this … question by examining firm responses to the Japanese patent reforms of 1988. Interviews with practitioners suggest the reforms … significantly expanded the scope of patent rights in Japan, but that the average response in terms of additional R&D effort and …

How do non-practicing entities ("Patent Trolls") impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question …", who exploit the patent system to extract rents and thereby hurt innovation. We employ unprecedented access to NPE …-derived patent and financial data, as well as a novel model that guides our data analysis. We find that NPEs acquire patents from …

This paper studies a simple model of experimentation and innovation. Our analysis suggests that patents may improve the … equilibria). In contrast to patents, subsidies to experimentation, research, or innovation cannot typically achieve this … project to implement. A successful innovation can be copied by other firms. Symmetric equilibria (where actions do not depend …

. The purpose is to document the ways in which patent systems are products of battles over the economic surplus from … innovation. The features of these systems take shape as interests at different points in the production chain seek advantage in …-style patent systems with all their imperfections have come to dominate other methods of encouraging inventive activity. The essays …

Patent counts are very imperfect measures of innovative output. This paper discusses how additional data-the number of … years a patent is renewed and the number of countries in which protection for the same invention is sought - can be used to … improve on counts in studies which require a measure of the extent of innovation. A simple renewal based weighting scheme is …

. Accordingly, this paper offers an empirical comparison of patents in relation to the award of prizes for technological innovation …Such institutions as patent systems cannot be well understood without an assessment of technological creativity in …. The data set comprises a sample of patents, as well as exhibits and prizes at annual industrial fairs in Massachusetts …