The article investigates the relationship between the USPTO's performance, in terms of the speed and quality of its patent examination, and the resources allocated to the Agency through the annual Congressional appropriations process. I find that average patent pendency at the USPTO nearly...

We provide evidence on the value of patents to startups by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of applications to examiners with different propensities to grant patents. Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win...

How does the publication of patents affect innovation? We answer this question by exploiting a large-scale natural experiment--the passage of the American Inventor's Protection Act of 1999 (AIPA)--that accelerated the public disclosure of most U.S. patents by two years. We obtain causal...

Does gender affect work quality and quantity? We study this question by leveraging the quasirandom assignment of patent applications to examiners, and micro-data on examiners' work characteristics at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Under the USPTO's incentive scheme that primarily...