Presentation at NBER Summer Institute
© NBER
Prof. de Rassenfosse will present his latest paper on patent quality at the highly selective NBER Summer Institute on July 19–20 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his paper, jointly written with Profs A. Jaffe and E. Webster, Prof. de Rassenfosse seeks to quantity the prevalence of low quality patents at the main patent offices.
A low-quality patent system threatens to slow down the pace of technological progress. Previous estimates based on litigation studies suggest that the majority of patents granted by the U.S. patent office should not have been issued, giving credit to concern about low quality. This paper proposes a new way of measuring patent quality. The methodology is based on twin patent applications granted at one office but refused at another office, and the authors apply it to the five largest patent offices. The results suggest that quality in patent systems is higher than previously thought, although the U.S. patent office performs weakly.
Participation to the NBER Summer Institute is a testimony of the high quality and relevance of Prof. de Rassenfosse’s research. The conference program is available at: http://conference.nber.org/confer/2016/SI2016/PRINN/PRINNprg.html
The paper can be downloaded at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2780255