Hall & Helmers on the European Patent Convention's Impact on Patent Filings and Foreign Direct Investment

The Impact of International Patent Systems: Evidence from Accession to the European Patent Convention, which Michael Risch posted about yesterday, caught my eye as well. As Michael explained, economists Bronwyn Hall and Christian Helmers examined the impact on patent filings and foreign direct investment (FDI) for fourteen countries that joined the European Patent Convention (EPC) between 2000 and 2008. (The countries are Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary, Iceland, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Turkey.)They find only a small change in patenting by a country's domestic entities. Foreign entities, however, rapidly switched to filing at the EPO, causing their filings in national offices to drop by over 90%. This figure nicely illustrates the effect:There was not a similar change to FDI: "Despite the clear impact on patent filings, using firm-level data on FDI, we find only very weak evidence that non-residents…

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