|
on Intellectual Property Rights |
|
Issue of 2018‒10‒15
five papers chosen by Giovanni Ramello Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale “Amedeo Avogadro” |
| By: | Billington, Stephen D. |
| Abstract: | Ascertaining whether patents encourage invention necessitates understanding the incentives inventors respond to. The British patent system prior to its reform in 1852 was cumbersome and expensive. Whether it facilitated or delayed the Industrial Revolution is hotly debated. This paper's contribution is to examine the incentives to patent, and the characteristics of patentees, by observing the entire population of British patents granted up to the patent reforms of 1852. I find inventors patented widely because they had valuable inventions. Their value was positively associated with the skills and wealth of patentees. Inventors responded to demand-side conditions, and the system's expense did not hinder invention. |
| Keywords: | Incentives,Innovation,Patents,Patent Quality,Industrial Revolution |
| JEL: | N74 O31 O34 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:qucehw:201810&r=ipr |
| By: | Emin M. Dinlersoz; Nathan Goldschlag; Amanda Myers; Nikolas Zolas |
| Abstract: | This paper reports on the construction of a new dataset that combines data on trademark applications and registrations from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with data on firms from the U.S. Census Bureau. The resulting dataset allows tracking of various activity related to trademark use and protection over the life-cycle of firms, such as the first application for a trademark registration, the first use of a trademark, and the renewal, assignment, and cancellation of trademark registrations. Facts about firm-level trademark activity are documented, including the incidence and timing of trademark registration filings over the firm life-cycle and the connection between firm characteristics and trademark applications. We also explore the relation of trademark application filing to firm employment and revenue growth, and to firm innovative activity as measured by R&D and patents. |
| JEL: | D22 L10 L21 L25 M30 O34 |
| Date: | 2018–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25038&r=ipr |
| By: | Cheng, Guo; Dharmasena, Senarath |
| Abstract: | Nuts such as almonds, pecans, walnuts, and pistachios are available in the U.S. market in different forms and brands. There are well-known national brands as well as not-so well-known private label and store brands. Nut producing firms compete for market share and strategically price, brand, advertise and position products in the market. Conventional brand-level analysis of such markets is achieved through calculation of market power and price cost margins assuming the presence of pure strategy Bertrand-Nash Equilibrium in prices. This is supported by a set of prior assumptions with regards to the structure of the market and oftentimes these are too restrictive, because pricing decisions are made in a complex multivariate situation with numerous interactions between variables that determine the prices and prices themselves. In this study, using 2015 Nielsen scanner data for nut products, complex causal relationships among brand level prices are estimated using cutting-edge machine learning algorithms. Also within this method, the concept of Markov Blankets is used to identify specific brands that are immediately important for a given brand. Several national brands were identified as a direct cause of the price of store brands. Even though store brands were associated with the highest market share, they had no influence on any other brands’ pricing decision and strategy. |
| Keywords: | Agribusiness, Industrial Organization, Marketing |
| Date: | 2018–01–16 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:saea18:266567&r=ipr |
| By: | Grafström, Jonas (The Ratio Institute) |
| Abstract: | There is a risk that if a government adopts a R&D spending policy directed towards wind power technology crowding out of other technologies might occur due to fiscal constraints and changes in relative prices. The purpose of this paper is to provide a backward-looking analysis of how the accumulation of wind energy patents and public R&D spending affected the domestic and neighboring country output of granted patents in the “related energy machinery field”. The econometric analysis, a Poisson fixed-effects estimator based on the Hausman, Hall and Griliches (1984) method, relies on a data set consisting of eight countries in Western Europe with the highest rates of patent production in the field of wind power between 1978 and 2008. The results show that an accumulation of a national wind power stock is a statistically significant negative determinant of a country’s related energy machinery patenting outcomes. However, no crowding out effects of public R&D spending were found. |
| Keywords: | knowledge spillovers; wind power; R&D; patents; renewable energy; innovation |
| JEL: | E61 O32 Q20 Q58 |
| Date: | 2018–08–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:ratioi:0310&r=ipr |
| By: | Benos, Nikos; Tsiachtsiras, Georgios |
| Abstract: | In this paper we use country panel data to explore the effect of innovation on top income inequality. We construct a novel dataset of patents by combining patents from USPTO and EPO to test the effect of innovation on income inequality. We demonstrate that innovation has a strong positive correlation with top income shares. Also, we find weak evidence that innovation has a negative effect on overall income inequality. We support our findings by using instrumental variables to tackle endogeneity. In addition our IV analysis shows that the effect of innovation on top income shares remains significant for 3 years. Finally, we show that innovation has a less strong effect on top income inequality when we include defensive patents in the analysis. |
| Keywords: | top income inequality, overall inequality, innovation, citations, defensive patents |
| JEL: | D63 O30 O31 O33 O34 O40 O47 |
| Date: | 2018–09–27 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:89217&r=ipr |