This paper re-visits the empirical failure to establish a clear link between R&D efforts and patent counts at the industry level. It is claimed that the 'propensity-to-patent' concept should be split into an 'appropriability propensity' and a 'strategic propensity'. The empirical contribution is...

This paper tackles one of the most persistent criticism of patent statistics. Because not all inventions are patented, the patent-to-R&D ratio reflects both a productivity effect (the number of inventions created per unit of research input) and a propensity effect (the proportion of inventions...

This paper decomposes the R&D-patent relationship at the industry level to shed light on the sources of the worldwide surge in patent applications. The empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset that includes 5 patent indicators computed for 18 industries in 19 countries covering the period...

The study of the innovative output of organizations often relies on a count of patents filed at one single office of reference such as the European Patent Office (EPO). Yet, not all organizations file their patents at the EPO, raising the specter of a selection bias. Using novel datasets of the...

This paper presents estimates of the depreciation rate of innovations using survey data on revenues associated with Australian patents. Its novelty is twofold. First, it relies on direct observation of the revenue streams of inventions. This is in sharp contrast with previous studies, which all...

Patent offices around the world face massive backlogs of applications, which threatens to slow down the pace of technological progress. However, economists lack analytical tools to tackle the issue. This paper provides a model of patent backlogs inspired by the literature on traffic congestion....

This paper estimates the effect of patent pledges, commitments made voluntarily by patent holders to limit the enforcement of their patents, on follow-on inventions. Patent pledges have been gaining popularity in recent years thanks to the highly visible pledges of companies such as Google and...

This paper studies the relationship between migration and the productivity of high-skilled workers, as captured by inventors listed in patent applications. Using machine learning techniques to identify inventors across patents uniquely, we are able to track the worldwide migration patterns of...