A current refrain in patent policy discourse is that “overly-broad” patents of “dubious validity” retard innovation. We … scope and/or validity harm innovation. The Selden automobile patent is alleged to have been such a patent. We review the … and validity of Selden’s patent claims, there is no evidence that innovation was retarded. We show that Henry Ford and …

I provide empirical evidence that quality-adjusted patents can identify technological innovation in small and medium …-sized enterprises. Survey data on commercialization of patents is related to patent quality indicators (patent renewal, patent family … correlations of the patent value indicators with technological innovation are noisy, this study provides stronger empirical support …

Critics claim that patent screening is ineffective, granting low-quality patents that impose unnecessary social costs …. We develop an integrated framework, involving patent office examination, fees, and endogenous validity challenges in the … courts, to study patent screening both theoretically and quantitatively. In our model, some inventions require the patent …

No firm or sector of the global economy is untouched by innovation. In equilibrium, innovators will flock to (and … innovation will occur where) the returns to innovative capital are the highest. In this paper, we document a strong empirical … pattern in green patent production. Specifically, we find that oil, gas, and energy-producing firms - firms with lower …

Patents are legal delinquents. A growing body of empirical evidence demonstrates that patents repeatedly fail to … fulfill the responsibilities they have been assigned in fostering innovation. But I argue here that in their moments of … misbehavior, we can catch a glimpse of the social roles patents play when no one is watching. Drawing on insights from the …

mechanism. Increases in patent protection should benefit those firms that rely on patents disproportionately more. We apply such … insight by combining measures of industry reliance on patent protection (IRPP) from seminal innovation surveys with the …We propose a novel empirical strategy for detecting the potential effects of patent reforms on R&D investments. Our …

The recent surge of patent disputes plays an important role in discouraging firms from entering new technology domains … (TDs). Using a large-scale dataset combining data from the EPO-PATSTAT database and ORBIS-IP and containing patents applied … at EPO between 2000 and 2015, we construct a new measure of litigiousness using patent opposition data. We find that the …

quantitative patent targets (e.g., for patent applications and patents granted) overshadows the type of benchmarking that better …This paper uncovers over 10 central level and over 150 provincial/municipal level patent targets, mostly to be met by … the absence of important criteria for ensuring patent quality. Further, the overly heavy focus on just a few types of …

-effects regressions, this study yields robust results. National patent protection alone does not stimulate domestic innovation, as …This paper evaluates the effects of patent protection on pharmaceutical innovations for twenty-six countries that … established pharmaceutical patent laws during 1978-2002. Controlling for country characteristics through matched sampling …

the optimal mix of patent and trade secrets when the innovator faces a strict novelty requirement and can only patent a …This paper analyzes the optimal protection strategy for an innovator of a complex innovation who faces the risk of … imitation by a competitor. We suppose that the innovation can be continuously fragmented into sub-innovations. We characterize …