A surprisingly small amount of empirical research has been focused on the process of obtaining a patent grant from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The purpose of this document is to describe the Patent Examination Dataset (PatEX), make a large amount of information from the...

While records of the assignments (transactions) affecting US patents and patent applications have been maintained by the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) for over 40 years, few researchers have used them. To help remedy this deficiency, the USPTO Office of Chief Economist is releasing...

Numerous scholars have proposed many different explanations for why inventors and innovative companies patent. Few scholars, however, have conducted empirical studies seeking to confirm or deny these theories. Furthermore, there are only a handful of studies examining how entrepreneurs and...

This study examines the revealed preferences of inventors towards secrecy in patenting by analyzing their disclosure choices before and after the enactment of the American Inventor’s Protection Act (AIPA) of 1999. We find that about 7.5% of U.S. patent applications use AIPA’s provisions to...

We offer description and analysis of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey, summarizing the responses of 1,332 U.S.-based technology startups in the biotechnology, medical device, IT hardware, software, and Internet sectors. We discover that holding patents is more widespread among technology startups...

This article examines the role of 'continuations' (procedural revisions of patent applications) in software patents and overall patenting in the United States during 1987-1999. The research represents the first effort of which we are aware to analyze data on continuations in software or any...