Does Patenting Increase the Private Incentives to Innovate? A Microeconometric Analysis

This paper examines whether patenting increases the private incentives to innovate in manufacturing. To study this issue, we build a model in which the value of an innovation depends both on the type of innovation implemented (product, process) and on the existence of a patent protection or not. We obtain a three-equation model that links the values of product and process innovations to the value of patent protection. This model and the feature of the data imply the estimation of a censored trivariate Probit model. We reach two main conclusions. First, the value of patent rights increases the incentives to innovate in products but not in processes and, conversely, the value of product innovations only – and not the one of process innovations – increases the incentives to patent. Second, we find that the distributions of product innovations and of patent values are skewed contrary to the values of process innovations. A significant share of the skewness in product values would come from the efficiency differences of intellectual property rights between the different activities.