A low-quality patent system threatens to slow the pace of technological progress. Concerns about low patent quality are supported by estimates from litigation studies suggesting that the majority of patents granted by the U.S. patent office should not have been issued. This paper proposes a new...

This paper re-visits the empirical failure to establish a clear link between R&D efforts and patent counts at the industry level. It is claimed that the "propensity-to-patent" concept should be split into an "appropriability propensity" and a "strategic propensity". The empirical contribution is...

A low-quality patent system threatens to slow the pace of technological progress. Concerns about low patent quality are supported by estimates from litigation studies suggesting that the majority of patents granted by the U.S. patent office should not have been issued. This paper proposes a new...

This paper provides an analysis of the impact of patent fees on the demand for patents. It presents a dataset of fees since 1980 at the European (EPO), the U.S. and the Japanese patent offices. Descriptive statistics show that fees have severely decreased at the EPO over the nineties, converging...

This paper re-visits the empirical failure to establish a clear link between R&D efforts and patent counts at the industry level. It is claimed that the 'propensity-to-patent' concept should be split into an 'appropriability propensity' and a 'strategic propensity'. The empirical contribution is...

Low-quality patents are of considerable concern to businesses operating in patent-dense markets. There are two pathways by which low-quality patents may be issued: the patent office may apply systematically a standard that is too lenient (low inventive step threshold); or the patent office may...