The disciplinary effect of post-grant review - causal evidence from European patent opposition

Markus Nagler and Stefan Sorg

No 7599, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-ino and nep-ipr
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Journal Article: The disciplinary effect of post-grant review – Causal evidence from European patent opposition (2020)
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