In our days, German machine tool makers accuse their Chinese competitors of violating patent rights and illegally … American technology. To understand the dynamics of this catching-up process we use patent statistics to analyze firms … this strategy by stipulating a patent law that discriminated against foreign patent holders and probably also by delaying …

Using application-level data from the Patent Office from 2001 to 2012, merged with personnel data on patent examiners …, we explore the extent to which the key decision of examiners — whether to allow a patent — is shaped by the granting …-deviation increase in the grant rate of her peer group, an examiner in her first two years at the Patent Office will experience a 0 …