Usually patent data does not contain any unique identifiers for the patenting assignees or the inventors, as the main tasks of patent authorities is the examination of applications and the administration of the patent documents as public contracts and not the support of the empirical analysis of...

The SearchEngine is an open source project providing an integrated framework for diverse matching activities, especially the linkage of large scale firm data by fuzzy criteria like company names and addresses. At its core, it utilizes an efficient candidate retrieval mechanism implementing a...

This paper investigates relative earnings of individuals leaving tertiary education without a degree across 18 European countries employing survey data on adult workers. We find that, on average, university dropouts earn 8% more than those never enrolling into tertiary education, but 25% less...

This paper investigates the impact of studying the first-choice university subject on dropout and switching field of study for a cohort of students in Germany. Using detailed survey data, and employing an instrumental variable strategy based on variation in the local field of study availability,...

How do intellectual property rights influence academic science? We investigate the consequences of the introduction of software patents in the U.S. on the publications of university researchers in the field of computer science. Difference-in-difference estimations reveal that software scientists...