Novelty value is one of the legal requirements for a patentable innovation but it has been given relatively little attention in the literature. It is often abstracted away by assuming that any innovation is patentable. We study the optimal novelty requirement in a model where ideas are scarce,...

We study whether and to what extent financial exchange innovations are in practice patentable in Europe. We find that exchange-related applications initially increased significantly after the State Street decision but subsequently decreased. The clear majority (65%) of applications come from the...

The debate on whether COVID-19 vaccine patents are slowing down the pace of vaccination and the recovery from the crisis has brought the optimal design of pharmaceutical patent policy to the fore. In this paper we evaluate patent policy in the US pharmaceutical industry. We estimate the effect...