Transaction costs and contracting problems associated with proliferation of patents may have a negative impact on innovation. We present novel data on how frequently innovative German firms encountered problems with access to intellectual property (IP) for their innovation activities. While a...

This paper presents a quality index for patent systems. The index is composed of nine operational design components that shape the transparency and stringency of patent systems and affect the extent to which they comply with patentability conditions. Seven components are related to rules and...

Building on the seminal work of Ginarte and Park (1997. Research Policy. 26, 283–301), we develop an index of property rights in pharmaceutical inventions, the Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property Protection (PIPP) Index, for 154 countries spanning 1960 to 2005. It incorporates five types of...

We examine the extent to which different types of substantive project contributions as well as social factors predict whether a scientist is named as author on a paper and inventor on a patent resulting from the same project. Using unique survey data from over 2000 life scientists, we find that...

This paper examines the intertemporal returns of patented inventions using estimates of patent value obtained from German employee inventors’ compensation records. The paper finds heterogeneity in the mean age and dispersion of the annual returns by technology and cumulative patent value....

The purpose of this paper is to explore the differentiated impact of demand-pull and technology-push policies in shaping technological patterns in the biofuels sector. The empirical analysis is based on a novel and original database (BioPat) containing patents in the field of biofuels selected...

Technological imitation may play a crucial role in motivating firms to innovate. However, theoretical predictions and empirical findings on the role of imitation have not yet reached a consensus. One major gap in the previous studies is that the empirical tests are based on samples consisting of...

In recent years, firms have increasingly contributed to and been confronted with a patent landscape characterized by numerous but marginal inventions, overlapping claims and patent fences. As a result, firms risk their patent applications to be pre-empted or to be infringed upon by rivals. While...

The impact of the geographical origin of patents on the probability of an opposition being filed and a patent being revoked has been examined in this paper, after accounting for patent value indicators and industry specificities. The study is based on a dataset of approximately 450,000 EPO...

The ability of firms to effectively use mechanisms that support them in profiting from technological innovation is key to outperforming competitors. Yet, such mechanisms have, for the most part, been studied in isolation, without accounting for interactions between them. We address this gap by...