This paper reviews the literature on the economics of intellectual property rights (IPR), with a particular focus on the main industrial property rights of patents and trade marks. Intellectual property rights arise from the legal protection accorded to certain inventions or creations. We begin...

Compulsory licensing allows firms in developing countries to produce foreign-owned inventions withoutthe consent of foreign patent owners. This paper uses an exogenous event of compulsory licensingafter World War I under the Trading with the Enemy Act to examine the long run effects of...

This paper examines Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and knowledge flows, using international patent data. The result is a measure of technology that isolates sources of innovation and their contributions to domestic TFP. Within-industry innovation enhances domestic productivity, and domestic...

This paper examines the effect of the German co-determination law of 1976 (MitbestG) on the innovative activity of German firms. Co-determination applies to firms with 2000 employees or more. Data from 1971-1976 and 1981-1990 on 148 firms are used to compare the number of patents granted to...

Technological standards give rise to a complements problem that affects pricing and innovation incentives of technology producers. In this paper I discuss how patent pools can be used to solve these problems and what incentives patent holders have to form a patent pool. I offer some suggestions...

Biographical information on a sample of renowned U.S. inventors is combined with information on the patents they received over their careers, and employed to highlight the implications of patent institutions for markets in inventions and for democratization. The United States deliberately...

Using patent citation data for the U.S., we test whether knowledge spillovers in biotechnology are sensitive to distance. Controlling for self-citation by inventor, assignee and examiner, cohort-based regression analysis shows that spillovers are local but that distance is becoming less...

This paper analyzes the impact of technological diversity on innovation inputs and success using Swiss firm-level panel data. While we do not find any impact of diversity on R&D intensity, we confirm a positive impact of diversity on patent applications as suggested by the literature. However,...

Die Analyse der Patentanmeldungen deutscher Unternehmen am Europäischen Patentamt zeigt: Die Unternehmen lenken ihre Forschungsaktivitäten im Ausland vor allem in die Hochtechnologiebereiche, in denen sie seit langem besonders intensiv forschen. Dies sind die Elektrotechnik, Steuerungstechnik,...

We show that if patent protection and trade secrecy generate asymmetricmarket structure, an innovator may prefer patent protection than trade secrecy even ifthe diffusion probability is higher under the former but it increases marketconcentration by preventing some imitators...