In recent years a great deal of attention has been paid to patent reform. This debate is exemplified by recent popular publications (Jaffe and Lerner, 2004; Bessen and Meurer, 2008), as well as publicized patent litigation such as the NTP v. Research-in-Motion patent litigation (the Blackberry...

Patent classification systems are largely designed for administrative purposes, limiting their value for most research purposes. To address this deficiency, Hall, Jaffe, and Trajtenberg (2001) developed a higher-level classification for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Patent...

Patent classification systems are largely designed for administrative purposes, limiting their value for most research purposes. To address this deficiency, Hall, Jaffe, and Trajtenberg (2001) developed a higher-level classification for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Patent...

Attention to the asset value of intellectual property (IP) has traditionally concentrated on high-value patent sales and licenses. This narrow focus neglects non-patent assets held by a broader set of economic agents, such as trademarks, and overlooks the evolving ways owners are employing and...

A surprisingly small amount of empirical research has been focused on the process of obtaining a patent grant from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). One major reason for this lack of research has been the paucity of readily-available data on the examination of applications....

A surprisingly small amount of empirical research has been focused on the process of obtaining a patent grant from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The purpose of this document is to describe the Patent Examination Dataset (PatEX), make a large amount of information from the...

While records of the assignments (transactions) affecting US patents and patent applications have been maintained by the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) for over 40 years, few researchers have used them. To help remedy this deficiency, the USPTO Office of Chief Economist is releasing...

Economists, legal scholars and policy makers are concerned about the impact of patent litigation on the rate and direction of US innovation and on the functioning of the US intellectual property system. At this time, however, there is no reliable, comprehensive, free and publicly accessible...

Patent scope is one of the important aspects in the debates over “patent quality.” The purported decrease in patent quality over the past decade or two has supposedly led to granting patents of increased breadth (or “overly broad” patents), decreased clarity, and questionable validity....

Recorded patent assignments have been maintained by the USPTO for over 40 years but have not been extensively utilized by scholars. One explanation is that they have not been in a form amenable for use in research. To help remedy this deficiency and foster research in the area of intellectual...