Patent rights, product market reforms, and innovation

Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt and Susanne Prantl ()

Journal of Economic Growth, 2015, vol. 20, issue 3, 223-262

Abstract: In this paper, we provide empirical evidence to the effect that strong patent rights may complement competition-increasing product market reforms in fostering innovation. First, we find that the product market reform induced by the large-scale internal market reform of the European Union in 1992 enhanced, on average, innovative investments in manufacturing industries of countries with strong patent rights since the pre-sample period, but not so in industries of countries with weaker patent rights. Second, the positive response to the product market reform is more pronounced in industries where, in general, innovators tend to value patent protection higher than in other industries, except for the manufacture of electrical and optical equipment. The observed complementarity between competition and patent protection can be rationalized using a Schumpeterian growth model with step-by-step innovation. In such a model, better patent protection prolongs the period over which a firm that successfully escapes competition by innovating, actually enjoys higher monopoly rents from its technological upgrade. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Intellectual property rights; Competition; Innovation; O3; L1; O4; L5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10887-015-9114-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Patent rights, product market reforms, and innovation (2015)
Working Paper: Patent rights, product market reforms, and innovation (2015)
Working Paper: Patent Rights, Product Market Reforms, and Innovation (2013)
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:kap:jecgro:v:20:y:2015:i:3:p:223-262

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10887/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10887-015-9114-3

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Growth is currently edited by Oded Galor

More articles in Journal of Economic Growth from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().