The Economics of the Patent System

Environmental Policy and Directed Technological Change: Evidence from the European Carbon Market

“…Patents provide a useful measure of the output of innovative activity and are available at a highly disaggregated technological level. Having said that, it is also worth noting that a number of studies have found that patent counts (output) are highly correlated with R&D expenditures (input) in cross section (Griliches, 1984), and shift concurrently over time and in response to shocks (Kaufer, 1989). Our main measure of technological change uses patents filed with the European Patent Office (EPO).…”

Learning from the Swiss Corporate Governance Exception

“…In fact, Switzerland did not find it in its interest to enact a national patent system until Germany threatened her with retaliatory tariff action (Schiff; ; Moy, ). The Swiss case shows that it may be advantageous not to have a patent law, assuming that domestic inventive capabilities are sufficient to a “free‐ride” by imitating the technologies already developed by foreign enterprises (Kaufer :48).…”

“…As noted by many authors (e.g., Kronstein and Till, 1948;Machlup and Penrose, 1950;Schiff, 1971;Kaufer, 1989;Moy, 1993;Baudenbacher 2012), Switzerland passed through almost the entire 19 th century without patent legislation. Before 1888, the year of the adoption of the first Swiss federal patent law, several attempts to introduce a patent system failed (Machlup and Penrose, 1950;Schiff, 1971;Kaufer, 1989;Baudenbacher, 2012). According to this literature, "because the Swiss economy was small, the incentive that Swiss industry received from patented exports was arguably greater than the incentive that dominating the domestic Swiss economy via patenting might have supplied" (Moy 1993:486).…”

Cultural Tourism in a Digital Era

“…Hypothesis 2 The More Effective External Search Depth Is Positively Related to Innovative Performance As many studies have already systematically analysed and synthesised the various theoretical debates in the area of IPRs economics (see for example, Andersen, 2004;Kaufer, 1989), this section does not seek to develop a comprehensive historically based understanding and typology of the rationales for IPRs, but instead focuses on the issue of appropriability in terms of IPRs protection in the OI.…”