It is crucial that patent offices grant protection only to those inventions that are novel and non-obvious. In 2004, the European Patent Office (EPO) made the unique move to systematically extend its prior art database by including documents shared among members of standard-setting...

Research and development (R&D) in the field of nanomaterials is expected to be a major driver of innovation and economic growth. Consequently, it is of great interest to understand which factors facilitate the creation of new technological knowledge. The existing literature has typically...

Based on a standard idea-based model of endogenous growth we test the hypothesis that regional innovative activity is path-dependent, and investigate the geographical scope of knowledge spillovers. Using data for West-German regions, two alternative indicators of the stock of knowledge are...

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...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the causal effect of a recent attempt undertaken by the EPO to improve the quality of the patent granting process. To do so we examine a policy change that aimed at including the information revealed during the standardisation-setting process into the...

This paper contributes to the literature on the impact of Big Science Centres on technological innovation. We exploit a unique dataset with information on CERN's procurement orders to study the collaborative innovation process between CERN and its industrial partners, mostly European firms....

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...

The focus in this paper is on knowledge spillovers between hightechnology firms in Europe, as captured by patent citations. The European coverage is given by patent applications at the European Patent Office (EPO) that are assigned to high-technology firms located in Europe. By following the...

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...