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on Intellectual Property Rights |
| By: | Gaetan de Rassenfosse |
| Abstract: | Intellectual property (IP) rules have the potential to shape cross-border trade far more than their legalistic origins might suggest. Drawing on three decades of evidence, this review shows that stronger IP rights simultaneously create market-power forces that raise prices and market-expansion forces that broaden demand, while dynamic incentives spur quality upgrading and new export varieties. Micro-data and quasi-natural experiments after TRIPS reveal that IP most often boosts trade along the extensive margin and redirects some activity toward licensing and foreign investment. Policy bundling and measurement gaps on the strength of IP rights still cloud causal inference. Future work must map intangible flows and enforcement quality to capture the digital, data-driven frontier of international commerce. |
| Date: | 2025–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2506.18929 |
| By: | Tate, Anya |
| Abstract: | The late 19th-century reforms to the British patenting system reduced the cost of obtaining a patent from over £100 in 1851 to just £4 by 1883. While increasing accessibility, this cost reduction led to an increase of low-quality patents often replicating previous inventions, raising concerns about the system's effectiveness. As a result, the 1902 policy proposed novelty examination for the first time, increasing the cost by 25%. This paper examines whether the implementation of this policy in 1905 had a differential effect on patenting activity across British regions. Despite the significance of this policy, it has received extremely limited academic attention. This research aims to fill this gap and add to the literature on the regional impacts of patent system reforms in this period. This study employs panel regressions using data on every geocoded patent sealed between 1895-1915 in the PatentCity database with regional employment in 28 industries as controls. Results indicate no change in the regional distribution of patenting activity as a result of the novelty examination. These findings are consistent with those of Nicholas (2011) for the 1883 policy and have important implications for the geography of inventive activity and the distributional impacts of invention policies. |
| JEL: | O30 R10 |
| Date: | 2025–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:129440 |
| By: | Bijan Aghdasi; Abhijit Tagade |
| Abstract: | Do markets price knowledge spillovers? We show that patent grants influence the stock returns of firms that are connected through technological knowledge dependencies. Using directed patent citations among publicly listed companies in the United States, we construct a granular measure of each firm's exposure to new patents granted to its technologically upstream firms. Patents granted to these upstream companies significantly boost its abnormal stock returns during the week of the grant. We find that these financial spillovers are predominantly localized within a firm's immediate technological connections. Additionally, we provide a novel empirical decomposition of financial spillovers generated from patent grants, by distinguishing those spillovers emerging from sources of technological knowledge, from those emerging from product market rivals (negative effect) and suppliers (positive effect). Our findings are robust to alternative specifications and placebo tests, and they suggest that technological knowledge spillovers create important market-priced ties between firms that are not fully captured by traditional product market relationships. |
| Keywords: | innovation, networks, spillovers, patents, stock returns, supply chains |
| Date: | 2025–08–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2117 |