One of the objectives of patent systems is to disclose information which other agents can build on in further inventions and in their decision-making. While some observers take it as given that real-world patent systems serve this objective, we argue in this article that patent systems are...

Innovation processes within corporations increasingly tap into international technology sources, yet little is known about the relative contribution of different types of innovation channels. We investigate the effectiveness of different types of international technology sourcing activities...

Vorliegende Studie analysiert die Determinanten der Eigenkapitalrendite deutscher Sparkassen. Die Untersuchung erfolgt auf Basis eines Paneldatensatzes, der die Bilanzdaten sowie regulatorischen Kenngrößen aller Sparkassen in Deutschland zwischen 1999 und 2007 beinhaltet. Die Ergebnisse der...

Public opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops (GM food) hasnot been based solely on concern about biological risks. Economic riskshave been widely cited too: the fear that the world’s food supply willbe concentrated in the hands of a few large firms, the fear that suchfirms will...

We investigate incidence and evolution of patent thickets. Our empirical analysis is based on a theoretical model of patenting in complex and discrete technologies. The model captures how competition for patent portfolios and complementarity of patents affect patenting incentives. We show that...

The existing literature identifies patent thickets indirectly. In this paper we propose a novel measure based on patent citations which allows us to measure the density of patent thickets directly. We discuss the algorithm which generates the measure and present descriptive results validating...

We analyze the duration of the patent examination process at the European Patent Office (EPO). Our data contain information related to the patent’s economic and technical relevance, EPO capacity and workload as well as novel citation measures which are derived from the EPO’s search...

This paper assesses the impact of adopting a post-grant review institution in the US patent system by comparing the “opposition careers†of European Patent Office (EPO) equivalents of litigated US patents to those of a control group of EPO patents. We demonstrate several novel methods...