This paper analyses the development of universities' patent applications in Germany before and after the abolition of … the 'professors' privilege' in 2002. By means of a database with all patent applications of German universities with … legislation is found only for universities without patent activities in the past. This indicates the importance of collecting …

a plausibly exogenous change to patent duration. Second, the nature of the law change meant that the patent duration … change was heterogeneous across patent classes. Using both patent counts and citation-weighted counts, I am able to take … advantage of the TRIPS-induced law change to empirically estimate the impact of patent duration on innovation. I find evidence …