Gaétan de Rassenfosse () (Centre Emile Bernheim, Solvay Business School, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels and ECARES, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels.) Bruno Van Pottelsberghe () (Centre Emile Bernheim, Solvay Business School, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels and DULBEA, Université Libre de Bruxelles and ECARES, Université Libre de Bruxelles.)
Additional information is available for the following
registered author(s):
This paper analyzes the role of patent filing fees requested by the member states of the European Patent Convention (EPC). We provide a first empirical evidence showing that the fee elasticity of the demand for priority applications is negative and significant. Given the strong variation in absolute fees and in fees per capita across countries, this result witnesses a suboptimal treatment of inventors across European countries and suggests that fees should be considered as an integral part of an IP policy, especially in the current context of worrying backlogs. In addition, we show that the transfer rate of domestic priority filings to the EPO increases with the duration of membership to the EPO and the GDP per capita of a country, suggesting that member states experience a learning curve within the EPC. The high heterogeneity in the transfer rates casts some doubts on the practice that consists in relying on filings at the EPO or at the USPTO to assess innovative performance of countries.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Université Libre de Bruxelles, Solvay Business School, Centre Emile Bernheim (CEB) in its series Working Papers CEB with number
07-022.RS.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: