One of the major reasons why inventors are awarded patents by governments is they encourage R&D investments and commercialization of inventions. If the patent holder commercializes his invention, he has stronger incentives to retain the patent. The purpose here is to empirically analyze the...

I apply a survival model to a detailed dataset of Swedish patents to estimate how different factors affect the likelihood of patent renewal. Since the owners know more about the patents than potential external financiers, there is a problem of asymmetric information. To overcome this, Sweden has...