Recent studies estimate that the economic impact of U.S. patent litigation may be as large as $80 billion per year and … that the overall rate of U.S. patent litigation has been growing rapidly over the past twenty years. And yet, the … relationship of the macroeconomy to patent litigation rates has never been studied in any rigorous fashion. This lacuna is notable …

class. We update the analysis to 2016 and account for a change in U.S. patent law that allows for citations to patent … applications in addition to patent grants, which is ignored by the authors in their analysis. We show that the number of highly …