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Articles in Refereed Journals
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research

The Disciplinary Effect of Post-Grant Review – Causal Evidence from European Patent Opposition

Nagler, Markus; Sorg, Stefan (2020). The Disciplinary Effect of Post-Grant Review – Causal Evidence from European Patent Opposition Research Policy, 49 (3), 103915.

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 significantly fewer patent applications in the decade after the decision. The 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.

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