We examine the Nash equilibria of a game where two national governments set patent breadth strategically. Broader … North can innovate, harmonization of patent breadth lowers welfare relative to the Nash equilibrium. When both countries can … innovate, harmonization toward narrower patent breadth may raise world welfare …

type of independent patent claims, we show an increase in the annual share of process claims of about 25 percentage points … (from below 10% in 1920). This rise in process intensity is not limited to a few patent classes but can be observed across a … shorter than product claims; but this gap has narrowed since the 1970s. These patterns suggest that the patent breadth and …

We study the effect of stronger patent protection on innovation activities of firms and firm-product level markups …. Relying on cross-industry differences in the use of patents, we exploit firm-level variation in exposure to India's patent … reform. For firms more exposed to stronger patent protection, we find an increase in patenting and R&D expenditure post …

From a firm’s perspective two competing forces are driving the decision to invest in innovation. On the one hand …, innovative performance is an important driver of profitability and growth. On the other hand, investments in innovation suffer … firms may protect their inventions by means of intellectual property rights, such as patents. By taking out a patent …

fulfill the responsibilities they have been assigned in fostering innovation. But I argue here that in their moments of … the door to a new examination of patent purposes, and to understanding some otherwise inexplicable characteristics of … patent law …

We investigate the causal effect of patent rights on cumulative innovation, using large-scale data that approximate the … patent universe in its technological and economic variety. We introduce a novel instrumental variable for patent invalidation … that exploits personnel scarcity in post-grant opposition at the European Patent Office. We find that patent invalidation …

Patent scope is one of the important aspects in the debates over “patent quality.” The purported decrease in patent …), decreased clarity, and questionable validity. Such patents allegedly diminish the incentives for innovation due to increased … licensing and litigation costs. However, these debates often occur without well-defined measurements of patent scope. This paper …

the frontiers of knowledge. It is difficult, however, to obtain a patent for an invention which seems impossible … laudable gatekeeping role, this Article identifies two problems with the law of operability. First, though objective in theory … becomes possible? History reveals that the Patent Office and the courts will continue to deny patents for a long time …

Patent scope is one of the important aspects in the debates over “patent quality.” The purported decrease in patent …), decreased clarity, and questionable validity. Such patents allegedly diminish the incentives for innovation due to increased … licensing and litigation costs. However, these debates often occur without well-defined measurements of patent scope. This paper …

postdoctoral scholars contribute equally to patent activity or whether there is a differential effect depending upon visa status …. We find patent counts relate positively and significantly to the number of faculty, number of PhD students and number of …