This paper presents an easy-to-use measure of patent scope that is grounded both in patent law and in the practices of patent attorneys. We validate our measure by showing both that patent attorneys' subjective assessments of scope agree with our estimates, and that the behaviour of patenters is...

Competition between firms to invent and patent an idea, or “patent racing,” has been much discussed in theory, but seldom analyzed empirically. This article introduces an empirical way to identify patent races, and provides the first broad-based view of them in the real world. It reveals...