Among the most prominent theoretical frameworks dealing with the economic underlyings of firms' make-or-buy decisions are Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the Resourced Based View (RBV). Relying on panel data covering 107 European firms over eight years I test predictions from both TCE and...

There has been a wide-spread misconception based on the imprecise wording of Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) that the protection of business methods by patents is prohibited in Europe. This paper investigates the legal framework set by patent laws with respect to the...

Recent research argues that the management of intangible assets is a key to firms’ longtermsuccess and requires specialized management techniques and a distinctive set ofskills (Rivette & Kline 2000, Standfield 2002, Granstrand 1999). It is further arguedthat the active management of firms’...

There has been a wide-spread misconception based on the imprecisewording of Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC)that the protection of business methods by patents is prohibited inEurope. This paper investigates the legal framework set by patentlaws with respect to the patentability of...

We analyze the duration of the patent examination process at the EuropeanPatent Office (EPO). Our data contain information related to the patent’seconomic and technical relevance, EPO capacity and workload as well as novelcitation measures which are derived from the EPO’s search reports. In...

Most econometric analyses of patent data rely on regression methods using a parametric form of the predictor for modeling the dependence of the response given certain covariates. These methods often lack the capability of identifying non-linear relationships between dependent and independent...