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on Intellectual Property Rights |
| 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:wpaper:129440 |
| By: | Griesshaber, Niclas; Streb, Jochen |
| Abstract: | We leverage multimodal large language models (LLMs) to construct a dataset of 306, 070 German patents (1877-1918) from 9, 562 archival image scans using our LLM-based pipeline powered by Gemini-2.5-Pro and Gemini-2.5-Flash-Lite. Our benchmarking exercise provides tentative evidence that multimodal LLMs can create higher quality datasets than our research assistants, while also being more than 795 times faster and 205 times cheaper in constructing the patent dataset from our image corpus. About 20 to 50 patent entries are embedded on each page, arranged in a double-column format and printed in Gothic and Roman fonts. The font and layout complexity of our primary source material suggests to us that multimodal LLMs are a paradigm shift in how datasets are constructed in economic history. We open-source our benchmarking and patent datasets as well as our LLM-based data pipeline, which can be easily adapted to other image corpora using LLM-assisted coding tools, lowering the barriers for less technical researchers. Finally, we explain the economics of deploying LLMs for historical dataset construction and conclude by speculating on the potential implications for the field of economic history. |
| Keywords: | Multimodal Large Language Models, Information Extraction, Dataset Construction, German Patents |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:safewp:335887 |
| By: | Fry, Tim R. L.; Longmire, Ritchard |
| Abstract: | The Consumer Panel of Australia data collected by The Roy Morgan Research Centre is used to investigate the determinants of brand choice behavior in the laundry detergent market. To reduce potential problems of heterogeneity in the market all purchases of the eleven leading brands in the Melbourne metropolitan area over the period July 1992 to June 1993 are considered. The purchases over this period are divided into an estimation sample and a holdout sample. A mixed Logit model is then fitted using the estimation sample. Price, brand loyalty, household size and household income are found to be significant in explaining brand choice behavior. A test for the, potentially restrictive, property of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IA) is carried out and it is found that IIA is acceptable for this data. The model appears to fit well and estimated elasticities are presented. The estimated model is then validated using the holdout sample. It is found that the model is very good at predicting the brand choices made by consumers in the holdout sample. |
| Keywords: | Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Research Methods/Statistical Methods |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:monebs:267919 |