This paper analyzes firms’ choices regarding the geographic scope of patentprotection within the European patent system. We develop an econometric modelat the patent level to quantify the impact of office fees and translation costs onfirms’ decision to validate a patent in a particular...

This paper investigates how patent applications and grants held by new ventures improve their abilityto attract venture capital (VC) financing. We argue that investors are faced with considerable uncertaintyand therefore rely on patents as signals when trying to assess the prospects of potential...

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...

Germany is one of few countries in which the monetary compensation for inventors is notonly determined by negotiations between employer and employee-inventor, but also byrelatively precise legal provisions. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of the GermanEmployees’ Inventions Act...

This paper provides new information, not available from other sources, on the characteristics ofthe innovation process in Europe, and on the economic use and value of European patents. Ourdata are drawn from a survey (PatVal-EU, or PatVal for short) of 9,017 patents granted by theEuropean Patent...

This paper analyzes the causality between inventor productivity and inventor mobility. Theresults show that the level of education has no influence on inventor productivity. Making useof external sources of knowledge, on the contrary, has a significant effect on productivity.Finally, firm size...