This thesis investigates the economic effect of patents and the patent system through the lens of patent commercialisation. The thesis is composed of four chapters, where each chapter is an independent scientific paper.In the first chapter, we present a ...
Description (through texts, images, models or samples) played a central role in the patent regimes that emerged in the eighteenth century, first in England, later in the United States and in France. Description ensured that the contract—protection in excha ...
By the end of the 19th century, an international order had emerged for patents, allowing business actors to use patents in many countries concurrently, and thus supporting a new phase in the development of industrial capitalism. Centered on Europe in spite ...
As an important policy instrument for guiding innovation, the patent system involves a long-standing tension between creating economic rewards for the original innovators and stifling subsequent R&D activities. The availability of new data allows us to pro ...
This dissertation studies the relationship between immigration and innovation. It adopts an empirical perspective and focuses on Switzerland, combining the use of patent data and immigration administrative records.The first essay is based on a novel dat ...
This study provides the first quantification of buyers' role in the outcome of R&D procurement contracts. We combine together four data sources on US federal R&D contracts, follow-on patented inventions, federal public workforce characteristics, and percep ...
Modern patent systems are slow, inefficient, expensive, and may result in outcomes that actively harm technological progress. This paper proposes a substantive re-think of these systems and lays a foundation upon which practical solutions can be built. Man ...
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 innovation, share this heterogeneous ...
We present a general method for imputing missing information in the Worldwide Patent Statistical Database (PATSTAT) and make the resulting datasets publicly available. The PATSTAT database is the de facto standard for academic research using patent data. C ...
Economic interpretations, in particular the lens of the Industrial Revolution, have strongly influenced our understanding of the rise of intellectual property. This article examines the political origins of the 1791 patent law in France, which is usually s ...
This article provides a long-term view on the sources of knowledge flow between developed and developing nations. It relies on patent data to explore three potential sources: R&D collaboration, technology sourcing, and technology transfer. All three source ...
This thesis addresses the question of a patent value from three different angles. It comprises three papers on the patent valuation methods. The patent valuation issues are well-known to the world of research and practice. However, the debates over what th ...
Inventions of foreign origin are about ten percentage points less likely to be granted a U.S. patent than domestic inventions. An empirical analysis of 1.5 million U.S. patent applications identifies three systematic differences between foreign and domesti ...
In 1791, the Loi relative aux découvertes utiles instituted a new patent system in France. Because patents were seen as the expression of the natural right of inventors, prior examination was abolished. However, only a few years after the law was passed, a ...
Evidence suggests that patents facilitate technology transactions but the reasons for the effect are unclear. Patents may assist trade in technology by either: (i) protecting buyers against the expropriation of the idea (the 'appropriation effect'); or (ii ...
This thesis proposes three studies that provide novel empirical evidence on how different types of proximity can affect innovation and science activities through various mechanisms and in different contexts. In the first study (second chapter of this thesi ...
Inventor disambiguation is an increasingly important issue for users of patent data. We propose and test a number of refinements to the original Massacrator algorithm, originally proposed by Lissoni et al. (The keins database on academic inventors: methodo ...
This article is inspired by the observation of a massive change of opinion on the part of economists regarding the question of the patent as a mechanism allowing an economically acceptable solution to be found to the so-called “imperfect appropriability” p ...
Building on the seminal work of Thomas J. Allen, we contribute to the emerging microlevel theory of knowledge recombination by examining how individual-level characteristics of inventors affect the breadth of their technological recombinations. Our data se ...
Starting a new venture is arguably an exciting journey into previously unknown territories. Since entrepreneurs, through their economic activities, are central to social prosperity, academic research has a strong interest to understand who those entreprene ...
