appreciation of socially optimal patent law. Shifting the law in favor of patent owners, a policy to encourage innovation, seemed …To encourage invention, society awards inventors exclusive rights through patents. Patent law trades off incentives to … invent new technologies against reduced access to already invented technology. However, patent law being national, it is …

innovation is based on citation-weighted patent stocks. In our estimation model, we control for endogeneity using instrumental …Mergers lead to larger firms and a less competitive market structure, but their effects on innovation are not clear …. Mergers may improve innovation incentives by promoting economies of scope and scale, R\&D activities, and increasing the …

and Q theories of mergers. Our measure of innovation is based on the citation-weighted patent stock. We find that …The impact of innovation on mergers has been a subject of debate in merger enforcements. Firms may decide to merge … because of increasing market share and expanding capacity. However, mergers may also be motivated by innovation since they …

linked fields. Our analysis uses 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties to map the innovation network and its … strength. Past innovation network structures are calculated using citation patterns across technology classes during 1975 …-1994. The interaction of this pre-existing network structure with patent growth in upstream technology fields has strong …

crisis has brought the optimal design of pharmaceutical patent policy to the fore. In this paper we evaluate patent policy in … the US pharmaceutical industry. We estimate the effect of patent length and scope on generic entry prior to the expiration … of new drug patents using two quasi-experimental approaches: one based on changes in patent laws and another on the …

type of independent patent claims, we show an increase in the annual share of process claims of about 25 percentage points … (from below 10% in 1920). This rise in process intensity is not limited to a few patent classes but can be observed across a … shorter than product claims; but this gap has narrowed since the 1970s. These patterns suggest that the patent breadth and …

forward citations patents can receive at the European Patent Office. While a patent can be cited as non-infringing state of … the art, it can also be cited because it threatens the novelty of patent applications ("blocking citations"). Empirical …. This finding adds to the patent value literature by showing that different types of patent citations carry different …

between imitation and innovation. Using US patent data for the period 1977-2005, we find that there are inverted U …-shaped relationships between the degree of industry-level technological imitation and industry-level innovation activities and between the … degree of industry-level technological imitation and the value of firm-level innovation. Our results suggest that positive …

This study investigates the relationship between product market competition and the market value of innovation using … firm-level patent data of US firms over the period 1977-2005. We find that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship … between competition and the value of innovation. Furthermore, we show that there is an "asymmetric" causal effect of …