While many firms compete through the development of new technologies and products, it is well known that new-to-the-world innovation is inherently risky and therefore may increase the probability of firm death. However, many existing studies consistently find a negative association between...

We use data from 3000 academic scientists to estimate the effects of other parties' patents on the academics' research. Nearly half of all scientists report that their choice of research projects has been affected by the presence of other parties' patents. We find that transaction costs and the...

This paper examines the factors that cause differences in patent examination outcomes at the trilateral patent offices using a dataset of more than 70,000 non-PCT patent applications filed at the European and Japanese Patent Offices conditional upon them being granted by the United States Patent...

We use data from 3000 academic scientists to estimate the effects of other parties’ patents on the academics’ research. Nearly half of all scientists report that their choice of research projects has been affected by the presence of other parties’ patents. We find that transaction costs...

Conditional on the decision to enter the market for immature technology, we test for the effects that trust – as proxied by the context in which the negotiating parties met – has on the likelihood that these negotiations are successful. Using a randomised dataset of 860 university-firm and...

We test for evidence that the patent attorney has an extra-ordinary influence on the patent examiner using data on examiner citations of 93 608 patent applications to the USPTO. We find that examiners cite patents from the same patent attorney (as used for the focal application) at an abnormally...

This paper estimates the effect of a patent grant on the likelihood that an invention will progress to different commercialization stages using survey data on 3,162 inventions which have been the subject of a patent application. We found that about 40 percent of all inventions advanced to the...

In this paper, we estimate the extent of misclassification in patent examination decisions between the EPO and JPO – that is, applications that are incorrectly refused a patent or incorrectly granted a patent. Using a proxy for inventive step as the predictor of the correct decision, we find...

Survey data from over 3000 academic scientists shows that nearly half of these scientists report that their choice of research project has been affected (to some degree) by the presence of third-party patents. We test for the relative effects of the costs associated with physically obtaining...

One of the principles enshrined in all international patent treaties is that equal treatment should be provided to inventors regardless of their nationality. Little is known about whether this ‘national treatment’ principle is upheld in practice. We analyze whether patent examination...