Search results for "European patent office"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
Patents, Competition, and Firms’ Innovation Incentives
2014
This paper presents fresh evidence on the interaction between industrial property rights (patents) and competition, and their joint effect on firms’ innovation. We use panel data of Spanish manufacturing firms for 1990–2006, as well as external information on European Patent Office and US Patent Office patent counts. We construct a new synthetic measure of competition and estimate the impact of patents on this measure at the industry level. Then, the effect of industry-wide competition and patenting on firms’ innovation is estimated at the firm level. Our results suggest that patents reduce the level of competition in the industry, whereas the effect of competition on innovation varies with…
Competition and innovation with selective exit: an inverted-U shape relationship?
2017
This paper extends the approach of the inverted-U relationship between competition and innovation at the industry level introduced by Aghion and coauthors. We use data of Spanish manufacturing firms from the Survey of Business Strategies (ESEE) spanning 1990–2006, as well as external information on patents from the European Patent Office and US Patent Office. Instead of an inverted-U shape, we obtain an unambiguous positive relationship between competition and patents. To explain this positive relationship, we modify their theoretical model to introduce the possibility of inefficient firms facing the threat of exit when competition intensifies. The modified model may explain both a positive…