Patents have long been regarded as the 'gold standard' of intellectual property protection. In 'Little patents and big secrets: managing intellectual property', Anton and Yao (2004) call this traditional view into question by finding that firms keep their most important innovations secret. This...

Post-grant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring post-grant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are...

We analyze the effect of patent thickets on entry into technology areas by firms in the UK. We present a model that describes incentives to enter technology areas characterized by varying technological opportunity, complexity of technology, and the potential for hold-up in patent thickets. We...

This paper utilizes a data set of over 208,000 U.S. patents applied for between 1975 and 2010 to study development of strategic patenting over time and across industries. With received citations as a measure of patent social value, we use data envelopment analysis to estimate firm-level relative...

This paper analyses the causal impact of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on pharmaceutical innovation in a panel of 74 countries. The identification strategy exploits the different timing across countries of two sets of IPR reforms. Domestic innovation is measured as citation-weighted...

This paper utilizes a data set of over 208,000 U.S. patents applied for between 1975 and 2010 to study development of strategic patenting over time and across industries. With received citations as a measure of patent social value, we use data envelopment analysis to estimate firm-level relative...

This paper analyses the causal impact of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on pharmaceutical innovation in a panel of 74 countries. The identification strategy exploits the different timing across countries of two sets of IPR reforms. Domestic innovation is measured as citation-weighted...

We analyze the effect of patent thickets on entry into technology areas by firms in the UK. We present a model that describes incentives to enter technology areas characterized by varying technological opportunity, complexity of technology, and the potential for hold‐up in patent thickets. We...

Patents have long been regarded as the ‘gold standard’ of intellectual property protection. In “Little patents and big secrets: managing intellectual property”, Anton and Yao (2004) call this traditional view into question by finding that firms keep their most important innovations...

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...