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 ...
By the end of the 19th century, an international order had emerged for patents, allowing business actors to use patents in many countries concurrently, and thus supporting a new phase in the development of industrial capitalism. Centered on Europe in spite ...
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 dat ...
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 ...
Economic interpretations, in particular the lens of the Industrial Revolution, have strongly influenced our understanding of the rise of intellectual property. This article examines the political origins of the 1791 patent law in France, which is usually s ...
This article provides a long-term view on the sources of knowledge flow between developed and developing nations. It relies on patent data to explore three potential sources: R&D collaboration, technology sourcing, and technology transfer. All three source ...
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 pro ...
This study provides the first quantification of buyers' role in the outcome of R&D procurement contracts. We combine together four data sources on US federal R&D contracts, follow-on patented inventions, federal public workforce characteristics, and percep ...
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 ...