EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

When the clock starts ticking: Measuring strategic responses to TRIPS's patent term change

Jorge Lemus (jalemus@illinois.edu) and Guillermo Marshall

Research Policy, 2018, vol. 47, issue 4, 796-804

Abstract: As a consequence of the patent term harmonization introduced by TRIPS, the term of U.S. patents became contingent on how quickly the patents are granted. We find that patent applicants strategically responded to this change in incentives. In the pharmaceutical industry, narrower patents with less detailed descriptions allowed applicants to reduce the approval time by 10.8% (170 days). Also consistent with a ticking clock, we find a reduction in the use of continuations across all industries. Our results suggest that the patent term change created long-lasting efficiencies in the patent office.

Keywords: TRIPS; Patents; Length; Breadth; Disclosure; Continuations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D9 K0 L5 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733318300398
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:47:y:2018:i:4:p:796-804

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2018.02.008

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:respol:v:47:y:2018:i:4:p:796-804