In several key industries, including semiconductors, biotechnology, computer software, and the Internet, our patent system is creating a patent thicket: an overlapping set of patent rights requiring that those seeking [...]
Combined with evidence that profit rates of return on pharmaceutical industry R&D investments tend to exceed risk-adjusted capital costs by only modest amounts, the pattern suggests that pharmaceutical industry R&D [...]
This paper analyzes how foreign patent rights (FPRs) affect US exports, affiliate sales, and licenses. Our approach is distinctive in three ways. We apply ownership, location, and internalization concepts to [...]
The paper seeks to understand the impact of the patent system on innovation by examining shifts in the strength of patent protection across sixty countries and a 150-year period. An [...]
This paper introduces a new internationally comparable data set that permits an empirical investigation of the effects of patent law on innovation. The data have been constructed from the catalogues [...]
This paper examines the determinants of M&A activity in the pharmaceutical-biotechnology industry and the effects of mergers using propensity scores to control for merger endogeneity. Among large firms, we find [...]
This paper investigates the relationship between product market competition (PMC) and innovation. A growth model is developed in which competition may increase the incremental profit from innovating; on the other [...]
While the potential for intellectual property rights to inhibit the diffusion of scientific knowledge is at the heart of several contemporary policy debates, evidence for the “anti-commons effect” has been [...]
Scholars have argued that the growing number of patents on research inputs may now impede upstream, noncommercial research by creating an “anticommons” in which rights holders may impose excessive transaction [...]
This paper evaluates the effects of patent protection on pharmaceutical innovations for 26 countries that established pharmaceutical patent laws during 1978–2002. Controlling for country characteristics through matched sampling techniques to [...]