In the wake of the international summits in Copenhagen and Cancun, there is an urgent need to consider the role of intellectual property law in encouraging research, development, and diffusion of clean technologies to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. This book charts the...

The problems with software patents are old and well-known. However it’s not for a lack of trying that they have persisted. Software and tech companies have been pushing Congress to fix things for years. Each time they do, however, industries that rely crucially on the patent system, like...

Using an original dataset of over 1,000,000 patents and empirical methods, we find that the patent system perpetuates inequalities between powerful and upstart firms. When faced with growing numbers of patents in a field, upstart inventors reduce research and development expenditures, while...

This chapter summarizes the basic characteristics of patent data as an innovation indicator and reviews some of the recent research using patent data, focusing on major developments since Griliches in 1990 [Griliches, Z. (1990). “Patent statistics as economic indicators: A survey”. Journal...

This database provides the latest and most comprehensive statistics across OECD countries on patent-based innovation indicators that are suitable for tracking developments in environment-related technologies. The indicators allow the assessment of countries' and firms' innovative performance as...

We analyze the use of patent protection as a new policy to direct technical change to clean technology. Contrary to popular belief, it is dirty (and not clean) innovations that should be excluded from patent protection to reduce emissions. In the shortrun, removing patent protection on dirty...

This essay is the introduction to a forthcoming volume entitled, Regulating Innovation: Competition Policy and Patent Law Under Uncertainty (Cambridge U. Press 2009 forthcoming). In addition to introducing all of the papers in the volume, this essay introduces the organizing themes of the...

This dataset provides the number of co-inventions (simple patent families) developed jointly by at least two inventors. This indicator is disaggregated by: Inventor country: country of residence of the inventor(s), integral counted; Variables: total number of co-inventions, and percentage of...