We investigate the causal effect of patent rights on cumulative innovation, using large-scale data that approximate the … patent universe in its technological and economic variety. We introduce a novel instrumental variable for patent invalidation … that exploits personnel scarcity in post-grant opposition at the European Patent Office. We find that patent invalidation …

One of the objectives of patent systems is to disclose information which other agents can build on in further … inventions and in their decision-making. While some observers take it as given that real-world patent systems serve this … objective, we argue in this article that patent systems are highly opaque and likely to be of limited value as a source of …

We analyze the impact of the probabilistic nature of patents on the functioning of Germany’s bifurcated patent … litigation system where infringement and validity of a patent are decided independently by different courts. We show that … bifurcation creates situations in which a patent is held infringed that is subsequently invalidated. Our conservative estimates …

We analyze the duration of the patent examination process at the European Patent Office (EPO). Our data contain … information related to the patent's economic and technical relevance, EPO capacity and workload as well as novel citation measures … the patent grant by the examiner or an actual patent grant. Highly cited applications are approved faster by the EPO than …