Critics claim that patent screening is ineffective, granting low-quality patents that impose unnecessary social costs. We develop an integrated framework, involving patent office examination, fees, and endogenous validity challenges in the courts, to study patent screening both theoretically and...

We develop a dynamic structural model of patent screening incorporating incentives, intrinsic motivation, and multi-round negotiation. We estimate the model using detailed data on examiner decisions and employ natural language processing to create a new measure of patent distance that enables us...

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control...