The present paper discusses the role of quality in patent systems from the perspective of patent offices' behavior and … quality level of their examination processes. Various objectives of patent offices' governors are considered. We show that the … quality of the patent system is maximal for the patent office that maximises either the social welfare or its own profit …

This paper presents a quality index for patent systems. The index is composed of nine operational design components … quality index, controlling for research efforts, patent fees and the "strength" of enforcement mechanisms. …

becomes insignificant when controlling for exposures to Betting-Against-Beta and Quality-Minus-Junk factors. Further, we …, rather, reward for the use of leverage combined with a focus on cheap, safe, quality stocks. Decomposing Berkshires …

on quality, price and welfare. The merging firms always reduce quality. They also increase prices if demand … responsiveness to quality is sufficiently low. The non-merging firm, on the other hand, always responds by increasing both quality … and prices. Overall, a merger leads to higher average prices and quality in the market. The welfare implications of a …

this, the UK government has pursued an active policy of hospital mergers, arguing that such consolidations will bring … performance, productivity, waiting times and clinical quality and find little evidence that mergers achieved gains other than a …

North American Free Trade Agreement. Our approach is novel in that we focus on quality, proxied by domestic price premium …, of current and future export products. Our findings are consistent with quality upgrading taking place in preparation for … for their domestic sales of this variety. Consistently with the hypothesis of quality upgrading before exporting, we find …

Non-contractible quality dimensions are at risk of degradation when the provision of public services is privatized …. However, privatization may increase quality by fostering performance-improving innovation, particularly if combined with … opening to private provision affected mortality rates – an important and not easily contractible quality dimension – using a …

quality. We model theoretically the effects of real exchange rate changes on the optimal price and quantity responses of firms … that export multiple products with heterogeneous levels of quality. The model shows that the elasticity of demand perceived … by exporters decreases with a real depreciation and with quality, leading to more pricing-to-market and to a smaller …

improve quality is that providers will face higher demand if they improve their quality. We test this crucial assumption in an … family doctor practices. We find that patients do respond to quality: a one standard deviation increase in a publicly … available measure of clinical quality would increase the number of patients a practice would attract by around 15%. …

. Treatment firms report 15-25 percent higher profits and exhibit large improvements in quality alongside reductions in output per … hour relative to control firms. These findings do not simply reflect firms being offered higher margins to manufacture high-quality … efficiency. First, treatment firms have higher productivity and quality after accounting for rug specifications. Second, when …