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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Prior research argues that USPTO first-action allowance rates increase with examiner seniority and experience, suggesting lower patent quality. However, we show that the increased use of examiner's amendments account for this prior empirical finding. Further, the mechanism reduces patent...

Most studies evaluating the macroeconomic effects of financial support policies on business-funded R&D use econometric methods that do not consider the existence of spatial effects, and generate biased estimates. In this paper, we discus and address this problem using spatial dynamic panel data...

We evaluate the impact of cooperation with public research on firms’ product and process innovations in France and Germany using Community Innovation Survey data from 2004 and 2008. We find that cooperating with public research increases product innovation, but has no effect on process...