The Value of International Patent Rights

Abstract

I study an inventor's decision to file for patent protection in each of an arbitrary set of countries, as a means of estimating the global value of patent rights, and the distribution from which patented inventions are drawn. Using oversampled, invention-level data from the 1974 international patent cohort, I estimate a randomcoefficient, multinomial probit model for the 18 leading patenting countries. The Monte Carlo simulation results are consistent with those of patent renewal models, except in the right tail of the distribution, where the international model imputes significantly more value (up to $50 million worldwide) to the most valuable iuventions. The international component of annual capitalized patent returns alone represents over $14 hillion in 1974 dollars, or about 21% of annual private business R&D in the countries under investigation. The average internationally protected patented invention generates about $245,000 in patent rights, with over half the total value captured by the top 5% of inventions. With the exception of Japan, the largest developed countries appear to grant more value in patent rights at home than they hold abroad.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 198 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.