How to Measure and Draw Causal Inferences with Patent Scope
International Journal of the Economics of Business, 26(1) 5-38 (2019)
Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise Research Paper No. 19-29
38 Pages Posted: 30 May 2017 Last revised: 5 Nov 2019
Date Written: October 9, 2017
Abstract
This paper presents an easy-to-use measure of patent scope that is grounded both in patent law and in the practices of patent attorneys. We validate our measure by showing both that patent attorneys’ subjective assessments of scope agree with our estimates, and that the behaviour of patenters is consistent with it. Using our validation exercise, we find that previous measures of patent scope (i.e. the number of patent classes, the number of citations made by future patents, and the number of claims in a patent) are uninformative or misleading. To facilitate drawing causal inferences with our measure, we show how it can be used to create an instrumental variable, patent examiner Scope Toughness, which we also validate. We then demonstrate the power of this instrument by examining standard-essential patents. We show that an (exogenous) diminishment of patent scope leads to patents being much less likely to be declared standard-essential.
Keywords: patent scope, patents, causal inference, innovation, measurement, patent examiners, examiner toughness
JEL Classification: O3, O30, O31, O32, O34, L11, K12, D4, D49
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