intellectual property

This paper develops a framework of analysis for the impact of patent rights on biomedical innovation in “technology follower” developing countries. Based on the framework developed in the paper, empirical data collected in an industry-level survey of the Indian pharmaceutical industry between November 2004 and January 2005 is used to analyze the impact of patent rights as recognized under the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) on biomedical innovation in technology followers.

This paper utilizes the renewal records of the EPO (European Patent Office) patents and estimates the patent value distributions in Germany, France and the U.K. An interesting finding, according to the author, is that the EPO patent holders are found to be much more willing to invest resources on finding new commercialization strategies in order to exploit their patented idea than the national patent holders in Pakes (1986).

The author examines the joint patent designation-renewal behavior of the EPO patent applicants during 1978 to 1996, using both nonparametric technique and a parametric model. Findings indicate that the value of patent rights increases with the economics size of the country and has a modestly increasing returns to scale.

Patent system in Europe has undergone significant changes during the 1970s around the establishment of the European Patent Office (EPO), and this paper tries to quantify the influence of such policy changes on the private value of European patents. Based on the patent renewal records, the author estimates the private value of patents in Germany, France and the U.K. obtained through the EPO patenting route during the early 1980s, and compares the estimated value with the patent value in the same three countries before the establishment of the EPO, as estimated by Pakes (1986).

This paper investigates on an empirical basis the fact that researchers’ inventiveness could to a certain extent be independent from private economic incentives. It concludes by opening some analytical perspectives about the pros and cons of PROs’ knowledge and technology transfer strategies and by suggesting that the dominant model could well look inappropriate in some respects.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the use of patents as a generally accepted indicator of
new knowledge and intermediate outputs of innovative activity more generally. It is intended as a background paper for further analysis based on the new so-called FEPOCI database on Finnish patents and related citations granted at the European Patent Office from the years 1991-2004.

Synthesizing social network theory with a view of knowledge transfer as a search process, the authors argue that knowledge inequality across social boundaries should reach its peak when the underlying knowledge is of moderate complexity. To test this hypothesis, we analyze patent data and compare citation rates across three types of social boundaries: within versus outside the firm, geographically near to versus far from the inventor, and internal versus external to the technological class.

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. They conclude that the often-voiced concern that patenting in academe has a nefarious effect on public research output is, at least in its simplest form, misplaced.

The authors build a model of pharmaceutical markets in the light of a patent race among competing firms. The incentive for R&D is the patent on either the breakthrough or the me-too drug. A feature of the model that has not been analyzed before is the prevalence of insurance in developed countries as opposed to developing countries, such that the true burden of financing R&D falls to a greater extent on the former than the latter.

This paper studies the impact of the strict patent regime on the patenting activity of Indian pharmaceutical firms and finds that patenting activity of these firms has increased after the signing of TRIPs. The study is conducted for 65 pharmaceutical firms for the period 1991 to 2004 using different parametric and semiparametric count panel data models.