IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/adr/anecst/y2005i79-80p211-240.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Peanut Butter Patents versus the New Economy: Does the Increased Rate of Patenting Signal More Invention or Just Lower Standards?

Author

Listed:
  • Panoma Sanyal
  • Adam B. Jaffe

Abstract

The explosion in the patenting rate in the U.S. during the last half of the 1990s is often attributed partly to an apparent decline in examination standards. We estimate a simultaneous equation model accounting for the fact that a decline in examination standards would itself induce an increase in dubious applications. We have a multi-dimensional panel, with data on the application and grant rates and country of origin and destination. We find that a 'loosening' of the grants standard by 1 percent increases applications by 8 percent in the full sample and by 3 percent in the Non-US sample. After accounting for the endogenous application response, the application elasticity of grants is around 0.124 for the full sample and 0.145 for the Non-US one. Countries whose patent applications are more likely to be successful in the US are more likely to be successful in other countries as well. These findings confirm that inventors respond to increased likelihood of success at the patent office by filing more applications, but also confirm earlier findings that the surge in patenting in the US in the last two decades appears to be driven to a significant extent by an increase in the underlying invention rate.

Suggested Citation

  • Panoma Sanyal & Adam B. Jaffe, 2005. "Peanut Butter Patents versus the New Economy: Does the Increased Rate of Patenting Signal More Invention or Just Lower Standards?," Annals of Economics and Statistics, GENES, issue 79-80, pages 211-240.
  • Handle: RePEc:adr:anecst:y:2005:i:79-80:p:211-240
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20777576
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ejermo, Olof & Hansen, Høgni Kalsø, 2014. "How Important are Local Inventive Milieus: The role of Birthplace, High School and University Education," Papers in Innovation Studies 2014/15, Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research.
    2. Hingley, Peter & Park, Walter G., 2017. "Do business cycles affect patenting? Evidence from European Patent Office filings," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 76-86.
    3. Sergio Petralia, 2020. "GPTs and Growth: Evidence on the Technological Adoption of Electrical & Electronic Technologies in the 1920s," Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) 2033, Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography, revised Aug 2020.
    4. Burke, Paul F. & Reitzig, Markus, 2007. "Measuring patent assessment quality--Analyzing the degree and kind of (in)consistency in patent offices' decision making," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(9), pages 1404-1430, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:adr:anecst:y:2005:i:79-80:p:211-240. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Secretariat General or Laurent Linnemer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ensaefr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.