intellectual property

The authors examine the influence of faculty patenting activity on the rate, quality, and content of public research outputs in a panel dataset spanning the careers of 3,862 academic life scientists. Using inverse probability of treatment weights to account for the dynamics of self-selection into patenting, they find that patenting has a positive effect on the rate of publication of journal articles, but no effect on the quality of these publications.

This paper is a study of licensing in a patent thicket. In a patent thicket licensing allows firms to avoid hold-up. It will have different effects on firms R&D incentives depending on whether firms license existing or future patents. The authors find that firms relationships in product markets and technology space jointly determine the type of licensing contract chosen.

This updated draft to the original working paper in 2003 develops a simple duopoly model in which investments in R&D and patents are inputs in the production of firm rents. Analysis of the model reveals a general necessary condition for the existence of a positive correlation between the firm’s R&D intensity and the number of patents it obtains.

This paper addresses the joint determination of intellectual property (IP) and externality remedies. The authors discuss the impact that IP has on remedies for externalities as well as the reverse problem of the impact externalities have on the design of IP. The results are discussed in the context of health care markets in general, and pharmaceutical markets in particular, the latter being one of the most R&D-intensive industries, and at the same time often being faced with altruistic access issues.

The authors examine the welfare impact of different intellectual property protection (IPP) regimes in private sector seed research and development (R&D). They take into account the period after expiration of legal IPP, and require simultaneous equilibrium in markets for R&D, seeds, and final product. Optimal IPP is remarkably insensitive to alternative parameterizations, except for R&D productivity. Results suggest that optimal IPP is greater than IPP in the U.S. seed corn market, but lower than the IPP that could be attained with genetic use restriction technologies.

This paper analyses several issues that arise when measuring technological specialisation with patent data. Three starting choices are required regarding the data source, the statistical measure and the sectoral aggregation level. The authors show that the measure is highly sensitive to the data source and to the level of sectoral aggregation.

This paper compares corporate and academic patents in order to test whether the sectors apply for patents with similar values and similar determinants of value. The determinants of patent value are mainly related to the identification of institutional sources of knowledge.

The objective of this paper is to analyse the determinants of 87 European universities’ patenting activities. The findings reveal that size of universities and the presence of disciplines (medicine and engineering) are positively associated with the size of the patent portfolio. There is no significant relationship between the R&D intensity of the regional business environment and the amount of patent activity while scientific capabilities do coincide with higher levels of patent activity.

The focus in this paper is on knowledge spillovers between high-technology firms in Europe, as captured by patent citations. The European coverage is given by patent applications at the European Patent Office that are assigned to high-technology firms located in the EU-25 member states, the two accession countries Bulgaria and Romania, and Norway and Switzerland.

The this examines competition between multiple firms to secure patents. When there are multiple intellectual property rights protection instruments, the authors find that the paths chosen in an R&D race can move towards the social optimum.