Patenting expanded rapidly across the post bellum South as its transportation network filled in and city growth extended markets. This was consistent with Sokoloff and Khan (1990), who demonstrated the elastic supply of patentable ideas in early America. Successful innovation required that...

Patents are monopolies granted to inventors in order to promote innovation, but they have a limited term because they also impose social costs. There is little empirical research on what constitutes an optimal patent term, or whether patent term should vary across industry categories. We take a...

Using new data on citations to university patents and scientific publications, we study how geography affects university knowledge spillovers. Citations to patents decline sharply with distance and are strongly constrained by state borders. The effect of distance on citations to scientific...

La capacidad de competir globalmente ha sido algo cambiante en el tiempo. Los procesos de innovación tecnológica y la educación condicionan en gran medida el crecimiento económico y esa competitividad internacional. La evolución y desarrollo histórico de los derechos de propiedad...

We take a first look at financial patents at the European Patent Office (EPO). As is the case at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the number of financial patents in Europe has increased significantly in parallel with significant changes in payment and financial systems. Scholars have...

Inventors and users of technology often enter into cooperative agreements for sharing their intellectual property in order to implement a standard or to avoid costly litigation. Over the past two decades, U.S. antitrust authorities have viewed pooling arrangements that integrate complementary,...

The different clusters that constitute the regional innovation system overall are slowly evolving. Some of them are getting adapted to the new market demands, at the same time as new ones are appearing. In the analysis of such evolution we will use the international research in the relation...

The Italian and European regulatory framework for patents would benefit from further improvements in order to foster dynamic competition between Italian firms. At the national level the exclusive allocation of the right to patent inventions to universities, rather than to researchers, would...

Using new data on citations to university patents and scientific publications, and measures of distance based on Google maps, we study how geography affects university knowledge diffusion. We show that knowledge flows from patents are localized in two respects: they decline sharply with distance...

The Innovation Act was introduced by the French government in 1999, with the aim of encouraging academic institutions to protect and commercialize their scientists’ inventions. We explore the effects of the Act on the distribution of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) over academic...