Since 1980, a series of legislative acts and judicial decisions have affected the ownership, scope, and duration of patents. These include: the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980; the extension of the maximum patent term in 1994; and the shift from a first to invent standard to a first to file system in 2011. These...

We document the generation and the content of the Comprehensive Patent Database (CPDB) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-1990), which is freely available at GESIS https://doi.org/10.7802/2448. The database contains all patents granted in the GDR and published by the Office of...

This paper documents the generation and the content of the Comprehensive Patent Database (CPDB) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-1990), Version 1.1, which is freely available at GESIS https://doi.org/10.7802/2423. The database contains all patents granted in the GDR and published by...

We use a panel of historical patent data covering a large range of countries over the past century to study the evolution of innovation across time and space and its effect on productivity. We document a substantial rise of international knowledge spillovers as measured by patent citations since...

We use a panel of historical patent data covering a large range of countries over the past century to study the evolution of innovation across time and space and its effect on productivity. We document a substantial rise of international knowledge spillovers as measured by patent citations since...

This paper investigates the determinants of EPO (European Patent Office) patent applications per capita using a panel of 22 OECD countries with data measured as five-year averages for the period 1980-1999. The patent production function is specified as a partial adjustment model and is estimated...

This paper investigates the effect of patenting on follow-on knowledge in cancer research. Using a difference-in-difference approach on an original dataset of patent-paper-pairs we are able to estimate the causal effect of the granting of a patent on scientic development in the same domain....

This paper analyzes firms’ choices regarding the geographic scope of patent protection within the European patent system. We develop an econometric model at the patent level to quantify the impact of office fees and translation costs on firms’ decision to validate a patent in a particular...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

This paper develops a methodology to compare the quality of examination services in different patent offices. Quality is defined as the extent to which patent offices comply with their patentability conditions in a transparent way. The methodology consists of a two-layer analytical framework...