reference library

As the America Invents Act (AIA) turns 10, patent students across the country may ask: if the law is already a decade old, why am I spending so much time…
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Branded drug prices command considerable attention in the United States yet defining a drug’s price is not straightforward because they vary substantially across settings. We link branded drug prices across…
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We estimate the effect of patent protection on follow-on investments in corporate scientific research. We exploit a new method for identifying an exogenous reduction in the protection a granted patent…
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This paper studies how innovative firms manage their innovation portfolios after filing for Chapter 11 reorganization using three decades of data. We find that they sell off core (i.e., technologically…
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We show how characterizing optimal patent policy for the pharmaceutical industry only requires information about generic producers’ responses to changes in the effective duration and scope of new drug patents….
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A pandemic calls for large-scale action across national and international innovation systems in order to mobilize resources for developing and manufacturing crisis-critical products efficiently and in the huge quantities needed….
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In this work, we attempt to provide a comprehensive granular account of the pace of technological change. More specifically, we survey estimated yearly performance improvement rates for nearly all definable…
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The pharmaceutical industry is facing substantial criticism from many directions, including financial barriers to access to drugs in both developed and developing countries, high profits, spending on advertising and marketing,…
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Delays in market entry of generic drugs are common. This study sought to identify the prevalence of delayed entry, the reasons for the delays, and the delays’ effects on Medicaid…
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Delays in market entry of generic drugs are common. This study sought to identify the prevalence of delayed entry, the reasons for the delays, and the delays’ effects on Medicaid…
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This paper examines the U.S. government’s intramural research and development efforts over a 40-year period, drawing together multiple human capital, government spending, and patent datasets. The U.S. Federal Government innovates…
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I survey some recent research on the role of patents in encouraging innovation and growth in developing economies, beginning with a brief history of international patent systems and facts about…
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Recent outbreaks of infectious pathogens such as Zika, Ebola, and COVID-19 have underscored the need for the dependable availability of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). The cost and risk…
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Brand-name pharmaceutical companies often file lawsuits against generic drug manufacturers that challenge the monopoly status of patent-protected drugs. Institutional horizontal shareholdings, measured by the generic shareholders’ ownership in the brand-name…
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Patents and other intellectual property (IP) have grown in relative importance in investments and market capitalizations of public firms (e.g., Corrado and Hulten 2010). This paper illustrates the construction of…
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Innovation policy involves trading off monopoly output and pricing in the short run in exchange for incentives for firms to develop new products in the future. While existing research demonstrates…
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Standard-essential patents (SEPs) have become a key element of technical coordination in standard-setting organizations. Yet, in many cases, it remains unclear whether a declared SEP is truly standard-essential. To date,…
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This chapter provides an overview of grant funding as an innovation policy tool aimed at both practitioners and science policy scholars. We first discuss how grants relate to other contractual…
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Whenever policymakers consider approaches to reduce drug spending, the pharmaceutical industry sings a familiar refrain— any reduction in drug manufacturer revenues will cause investment to wither, depriving manufacturers of the…
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As yet another coronavirus spreads around the globe, scientists are once again trying to develop new treatments and vaccines. Much remains unknown about this family of viruses. But we know…
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Understanding the profitability of pharmaceutical companies is essential to formulating evidence-based policies to reduce drug costs while maintaining the industry’s ability to innovate and provide essential medicines. This cross-sectional study…
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The mean cost of developing a new drug has been the subject of debate, with recent estimates ranging from $314 million to $2.8 billion. Data were analyzed on new therapeutic…
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Social and policy interest in intellectual property, and patents, in particular, is growing. This is reflected in the rise of scholarly inquiry on the topic beyond the legal community, including…
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We analyze wartime prosthetic device patents to investigate how procurement policy affects the cost, quality, and quantity of medical innovation. Analyzing whether inventions emphasize cost and/or quality requires generating new…
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The negotiations of the Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) (2006-2008), undertaken by the Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO), were the result…
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The economic valuation of intellectual property is an area with which IP professionals still need to fully come to grips with. In the context of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs), the…
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In four cases handed down between 2010 and 2014, the Supreme Court articulated a new two-step patent eligibility test that drastically reduced the scope of patent protection for software inventions….
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In most contexts, making up data is forbidden – considered fraudulent, even immoral. Not so in patents. Patents often contain experimental data, and it is perfectly acceptable for these experiments…
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This article deals with a period of transition for most patent systems in Europe and North America, from instruments of royal prerogative power to specialized and statute-based weapons of capitalist…
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This paper describes the results of an inquiry into appropriability conditions in more than one hundred manufacturing industries. We discuss how this information has been and might be used to…
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High and continually increasing pharmaceutical drug spending is a major health and health policy concern in the United States.This economic evaluation of drug prices focuses on 49 top-selling brand-name medications…
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In keeping with our mandate to provide advice on the broad range of policy issues raised by the development and use of genetic technologies as well as our charge to…
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Forty years ago, Justice Stephen Breyer expressed serious doubts about the economic soundness of extending copyright protection to computer programs in his seminal article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright. A…
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In recent years, there has been a growing push towards state legislation that would provide consumers with a “right to repair” their products. Currently 18 states have pending legislation that…
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“The 2017 Edition reflects the following principal developments: Trade Secrets: Congress passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016, one of the most momentous changes in the history of trade…
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How do non-practicing entities (“Patent Trolls”) impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question has important implications for industrial policy, little direct evidence about it exists. This paper provides new…
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On August 11, 2020, the Ninth Circuit handed down its opinion in Federal Trade Commission v. Qualcomm Inc., reversing the district court’s judgment in favor of the FTC. This essay…
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No firm or sector of the global economy is untouched by innovation. In equilibrium, innovators will flock to (and innovation will occur where) the returns to innovative capital are the…
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Intellectual Property law was once an arcane subject. Today it is at the center of some of the most highly charged political contests of our time. In recent years, college…
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Many regulatory agency employees are hired by the firms they regulate, creating a “revolving door” between government and the private sector. We study these transitions using detailed data from the…
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How important is information disclosure through patents for subsequent innovation? Although disclosure is regarded as essential to the functioning of the patent system, legal scholars have expressed considerable skepticism about…
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Competition between firms to invent and patent an idea, or “patent racing,” has been much discussed in theory, but seldom analyzed empirically. This article introduces an empirical way to identify…
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As we observe the 18th anniversary of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) and Public Health, it is appropriate to take…
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Scholarly work seeking to understand academics’ commercial activities often draws on abstract notions of the institution of science and of the representative scientist. Few scholars have examined whether and how…
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In a recent study, The Perryman Group (TPG), a world-renowned group of economists widely used and respected by industry and government, measured the effect of the AIA and PTAB on…
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Do information differences across US physicians contribute to treatment disparities? This paper uses a unique new dataset to evaluate how changes in physician access to a decision-relevant drug database affect…
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“We analyze the role that the launch of new drugs has played in reducing the number of years of life lost (YLL) before 3 different ages (85, 70, and 55)…
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Patent law is virtually alone in intellectual property (IP) in punishing independent development. To infringe a copyright or trade secret, defendants must copy the protected IP from the plaintiff, directly…
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We show that examiner-driven variation in patent rights leads to quantitatively large impacts on several patent outcomes, including patent value, citations, and litigation. Notably, Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) overwhelmingly purchase…
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This report analyzes the twelve best selling drugs in the United States and reveals that drugmakers file hundreds of patent applications – the vast majority of which are granted –…
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Domestic patent, copyright and trademark regimes are traditionally justified on an incentive rationale. While international intellectual property agreements are nominally aimed at harnessing global markets to expand incentives, this article…
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Patent protection is assumed to benefit entrepreneurs seeking investment, because patents signal quality and are an asset that can be resold if a startup fails. This column argues that the…
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This paper analyzes how patent-induced shocks to labor productivity propagate into worker compensation using a new linkage of US patent applications to US business and worker tax records. We infer…
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The United States government is taking a targeted, practical, and comprehensive approach toward addressing intellectual property policy and strategy. The goal is to ensure a level playing field for American…
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This paper raises three issues on the relationship between intellectual property and inequality. The first is a simple logical point. Patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property are public…
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We analyze how frivolous patent-infringement claims made by non-practicing entities (NPEs, or “patent trolls”) affect startups’ ability to grow and create jobs, innovate, and raise capital. Our identification strategy exploits…
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Frivolous patent-infringement claims increase the cost of innovation for small businesses and force them to exit via premature and discounted acquisitions. This study investigates the effect of abusive patent-infringement claims…
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This symposium piece first seeks to unpack the relationship between intellectual property infringement and property offenses, and then to understand how the connection between the two has informed when the…
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I argue that the growing dominance of patent analysis not only fails to provide valuable and reliable insight into innovation processes, but is a smoke screen that prevents social scientists…
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Disagreements over intellectual property rights policies have been a major roadblock in recent trade agreement talks, and the issue has also been a pillar of critiques of globalisation. This column…
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Using data on 800,000 corporate publications and patent citations to these publications between 1980 and 2015, we study how corporate investment in research is linked to its use in the…
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The entire point of a healthy patent system is on spurring invention and investment, by rewarding inventor and investor alike, big or small, with exclusive rights of limited duration, for…
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When investing in research and development (R&D), institutions must decide whether to take a top-down approach — soliciting a particular technology — or a bottom-up approach in which innovators suggest…
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Patent holdup has proven one of the most controversial topics in innovation policy, in part because companies with a vested interest in denying its existence have spent tens of millions…
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This staff report describes the actions of Celgene Corporation and Bristol Myers Squibb Company in repeatedly raising the price of Revlimid, a critical drug to treat multiple myeloma and other…
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Patent law’s doctrine of ineligible subject matter is widely agreed to be in a bad state of repair. Even those welcoming the Supreme Court’s return to express subject-matter bars have…
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Big Pharma’s innovation argument just does not stand up to scrutiny. We can’t allow drug corporations to continue to hide behind their threat that if we do anything to curb…
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Whether behavior relating to a patent thicket presents an antitrust issue is a nuanced question. But a recent ruling involving the biologic Humira shows how not to decide these issues….
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This chapter is from the edited volume “Injunctions in Patent Law: A Trans-Atlantic Dialogue on Flexibility and Tailoring” (Jorge Contreras & Martin Husovec, eds., Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming). It offers…
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Every year, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry develops a variety of new drugs that provide valuable medical benefits. Many of those drugs are expensive and contribute to rising health care costs…
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Patent expiration is a consequential event for not only the drug undergoing patent expiration, but also the therapeutic class in which the drug is contained. Market dynamics change significantly for…
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Technical progress increasingly relies on the use of scientific knowledge. But if much of this knowledge is in the public domain, can it be a source of private value? We…
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Knowledge of how science is consumed in public domains is essential for a deeper understanding of the role of science in human society. While science is heavily supported by public…
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This paper proposes a novel approach to measure disclosure in patent applications using algorithms from computational linguistics. Borrowing methods from the literature on second language acquisition, we analyze core linguistic…
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The ‘quality’ of novel technological innovations is extremely variable, and the ability to measure innovation quality is essential to sensible, evidence-based policy. Patents, an often vital precursor to a commercialised…
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Like other rights, patent rights are not absolute. There are situations in which their exercise can be limited to protect public interests. Such situations may arise, for instance, when access…
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When judges change the legal rules governing patents, those changes are always retroactive. That is, they apply equally to patents that have already been granted and patents that do not…
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Biologics accounted for roughly $145 billion in spending in 2018 (IQVIA, 2019). They are also the fastest growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry. The Biological Price Competition and Innovation Act…
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“This essay examines patent abandonment rates and application rates to determine if they can shed light on how the Covid-19 pandemic affected innovation. While the results show temporary perturbations, the…
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To end the COVID-19 pandemic and ensure a return of normalcy, an effective and safe vaccine is the best hope. The vaccine nationalism approach, adopted by some countries to gain…
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This article provides a review of the role and functions of patents in society using data and evidence from the economic and management literature. While patents provide private protection to…
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The requirement of nonobviousness, codified in 35 U.S.C. § 103, has been called “the ultimate condition of patentability” because of its crucial function of keeping technically trivial inventions out of…
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As the U.S. patent system has weakened, venture capital investment shifted away from patentintensive industries. We supplemented our exhaustive review of 14 years of data tracking VC investment by talking…
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Vaccinating the world’s population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for…
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To examine the drivers of innovation, this paper studies the global R&D effort to fight the deadliest diseases and presents four results. We find: (1) global pharmaceutical R&D activity—measured by…
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If a litigated patent has previously been licensed to a third party, the courts generally adopt the terms of the prior agreement as the best measure of damages. However, while…
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Continuations allow inventors to claim technology developed after the original filing date of their patent, leading to concerns about inadvertent infringement and hold-up. We use the link between patents and…
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We study the innovation and diffusion of technology at the industry level. We derive the full dynamic paths of an industry’s evolution, from birth to its maturity, and we characterize…
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If innovation is to be subsidized, a natural place to start is to increase the quantity and quality of human capital. Innovation, after all, begins with people. Simply stimulating the…
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In the past several decades, the U.S. economy has witnessed a number of striking trends that indicate a rising market concentration and a slowdown in business dynamism. In this paper,…
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“This study examines whether the conduct that the FTC challenged represented isolated instances or is more typical, and whether the 180-day exclusivity and the 30- month stay provisions of the…
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We establish four facts concerning competition among U.S. generic drug suppliers, using IQVIA’s National Sales Perspective™ 2004Q4 – 2016Q3 data. We define a unique product market (“molform”), consisting of the…
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One of the most important questions in contemporary design patent law is how to interpret the phrase “article of manufacture” in 35 U.S.C. § 289. While there has been much…
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This work examines the contribution of NIH funding to published research associated with 210 new molecular entities (NMEs) approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016. We identified >2…
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There is widespread belief that the Patent Office issues too many bad patents that impose significant harms on society. At first glance, the solution to the patent quality crisis seems…
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The goal of science is to advance knowledge, yet little is known about its value for marketplace inventions. While important breakthrough technologies could not have been developed without scientific background,…
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We study the matching of patent applications to examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Using test statistics originally developed to identify industry agglomeration, we find strong evidence that…
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Despite much theoretical attention to the concept of procrastination and much exploration of this phenomenon in laboratory settings, there remain few empirical investigations into the practice of procrastination in real…
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There is general agreement that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is issuing too many invalid patents that are unnecessarily reducing consumer welfare, stunting productive research, and discouraging innovation. In…
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We explore how examiner behavior is altered by the time allocated for reviewing patent applications. Insufficient examination time may hamper examiner search and rejection efforts, leaving examiners more inclined to…
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