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This paper assesses the extent to which the international migration of inventors affects innovation in the receiving country. Drawing on a novel database that maps the migratory patterns of inventors, we exploit the end of the Soviet Union and the conseque ...
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 pr ...
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 datab ...
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 ...
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 n ...
Governments have strong incentives to allow their inventors to free ride on foreign technologies. They can achieve this result by discriminating against foreigners in the patent system-by refusing to grant foreigners a patent for their inventions. Internat ...
Patents have traditionally been used in the history of technology as an indication of the thinking process of the inventors, of the challenges or “reverse salients” they faced, or of the social groups influencing the construction of technology. More recent ...
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 ...
Ne connaissant pas de loi sur les brevets d’invention avant 1888, la Suisse du XIXe siècle suit une trajectoire originale en Europe de l’Ouest. La première législation exclut les substances et les procédés chimiques par une clause qui ne paraît pas moins s ...
The United States patent system is unique in that it requires applicants to cite documents they know to be relevant to the examination of their patent applications. Lampe (2012) presents evidence that applicants strategically withhold 21-33% of relevant ci ...
