This paper develops a sequential application-grant framework to analyze competing explanations for the two U.S. patent surges during the mid-eighties and early nineties: (a) the ¿friendly court¿ hypothesis argues that legislative changes in the 1980s lowered the cost of patenting and led to...

The rate of patenting in the U.S. has exploded in the last half of the 1990s. It is widely believed that the increase in patent grants is at least partly a result of the apparent decline in examination standards. There has been little exploration, however, of the theoretical prediction that a...

This paper analyzes the effects of different sources of R&D funding and patent office attributes on the patenting process. Another important contribution is modeling the effect of a random delay in the 'pendency' time as a stochastic process and quantifying its effect on patenting. The empirical...