How Do Patents Affect Research Investments?

Heidi Williams ()

No 23088, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: While patent systems have been widely used both historically and internationally, there is nonetheless a tremendous amount of controversy over whether patent systems – in practice – improve the alignment between private returns and social contributions. In this paper, I describe three parameters – how the disclosure function affects research investments, how patent strength affects research investments in new technologies, and how patents on existing technologies affect follow-on innovation – needed to inform the question of how patents affect research investments, and review the available evidence which has attempted to empirically estimate these parameters.

JEL-codes: H41 K0 O3 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn, nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-law
Note: LE PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Published as Heidi L. Williams, 2017. "How Do Patents Affect Research Investments?," Annual Review of Economics, vol 9(1), pages 441-469.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23088.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Do Patents Affect Research Investments? (2017)
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:nbr:nberwo:23088

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23088

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().