The Disciplinary Effect of Post-Grant Review - Causal Evidence from European Patent Opposition
41 Pages Posted: 25 Apr 2019
Date Written: 2019
Abstract
We study the causal impact of invalidating marginally valid patents during post-grant opposition at the European Patent Office on affected inventors’ subsequent patenting. We exploit exogenous variation in invalidation by leveraging the participation of a patent’s original examiner in the opposition division as an instrument. We find a disciplinary effect of invalidation: Affected inventors file 20% fewer patent applications in the decade after the decision. This effect is entirely driven by a reduction in low-quality filings, i.e., filings that examiners associate with prior art that threatens the application’s novelty or inventive step. We do not observe shifts into national patenting.
Keywords: inventors, marginal patents, patent invalidation, patent opposition, post-grant review, EPO, innovation
JEL Classification: O310, O340
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