Over the past quarter of a century, trade mark applications have grown by 2.3 per cent per annum faster than real GDP in Australia. This paper explores the factors associated with this growth. We find some evidence that over the past two decades, trademarking has been associated with more...

This paper examines the effects of market power and product differentiation on demand for grocery products in Australia over the period 2002 to 2005. We construct a model of the relationship between demand, market power and brand characteristics and then estimate the model using monthly data on...

In this paper, we focus on the effects of macroeconomic conditions on commercialisation. Using survey data on the activities of Australian inventors who attempted to commercialise 3,736 inventions over the period 1986--2005, we find evidence that macroeconomic conditions have a pro-cyclical...

This paper estimates the effect of a patent grant on the likelihood that an invention will progress to different commercialization stages, using survey data on 3,162 inventions that were the subject of a patent application. We find that about 40 percent of all inventions advanced to the point of...

In this paper, we estimate the extent of misclassification in patent examination decisions between the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Japanese Patent Office (JPO), that is, applications that are incorrectly refused a patent or incorrectly granted a patent. Using a proxy for inventive step...

We use data from 3000 academic scientists to estimate the effects of other parties' patents on the academics' research. Nearly half of all scientists report that their choice of research projects has been affected by the presence of other parties' patents. We find that transaction costs and the...