Working papers and book chapters

Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) economists and their collaborators conduct a variety of policy relevant research and make their preliminary findings available as working papers and book chapters.

The contribution of startups, venture finance, and patenting to innovation in U.S. agriculture

Gregory D. Graff, Charles deGrazia, and Nicholas Rada
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-2
July 2024
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To evaluate the role played by startup companies in the innovation ecosystem of U.S. agriculture, we compile a unique dataset of 6,024 startups founded 1987-2019 that details their financing lifecycles, annual economic performance, and patenting activities. One-third of the startups in the sample have observable signs that they are contributing to innovation. Yet many of them operate in industry sectors or technology fields not generally identified as agricultural. In aggregate, external financing and patenting by startups have grown substantially over the time period, and those startups with patent applications have received more external financing than those without. We use a discrete-time survival analysis to test factors related to startups receiving investments as well as achieving successful financial exits. We find startups that filed for a patent have a higher likelihood of receiving investments than those that did not. Patent applications also increase the relative probability of a successful financial exit, which takes place primarily through mergers and acquisitions (M&As). In about a third of the M&A exits reported by startups with patent portfolios, the startups are acquired by corporate incumbents already conducting R&D in agriculture. The startups acquired by incumbents hold relatively larger portfolios of patents that are more highly cited yet technologically more narrowly focused. Importantly, a substantial portion of the startups in the sample are still too young to have attained venture financing let alone a financial exit.

Untapped Potential: Investigating Gender Disparities in Patent Citations

Gauri Subramani and Michelle Saksena
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-3
July 2024
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Innovation is often a cumulative process that relies heavily on prior research. A primary way to measure knowledge flows in the context of invention is by using patent citations. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the gender composition of inventor teams and the likelihood that a patent is cited by patent applicants on subsequent patents. We see that patents by majority-female inventor teams receive 4-22% fewer citations than patents by majority-male inventor teams. We explore the potential drivers of this gap and find that citations to patents granted to majority female teams are more likely to be omitted from the citations of a patent than are those patents with similar content granted to majority male teams. We identify that this gap is primarily driven by applicant-added citations rather than those added by patent examiners. The gap appears to be exacerbated by gender-based team homophily; that is, patents by majority male teams are more likely to cite other patents granted to majority male teams. Second, we find evidence that patents by majority female teams are less likely to be further developed, and consequently, are cited less frequently compared to patents granted to majority male inventor teams. We interpret this finding as suggestive evidence that the gender composition of inventor teams can affect follow-on patenting and thus can have broader implications on the landscape of innovation. This work has implications for our understanding of the relationship between gender and the drivers of innovation, as well as the limitations of citations as a measure of patent impact.

Technical Documentation for Patent Litigation Docket Reports Data, 1963-2020

Andrew A. Toole, Richard Miller and Ted M. Sichelman
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-1
March 2024
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In March of 2017, the Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) first released patent litigation docket report data for public use. For cases included in Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) for the 1963-2015 period, the data files included information on the litigating parties involved and their attorneys; the cause of action; the court location; important dates in the litigation history; and descriptions of all documents submitted in a given case. In 2019, the data files were updated through calendar year 2016 and a file containing hand-coded patents-in-suit and case types was added. As of March 2024, the Patent Litigation Docket Report Data has been updated and now contains detailed patent litigation data on nearly 97,000 unique district court cases filed through 2020. Although the data elements made available are essentially the same as in the previous release, we include data on cases filed between 2017 and 2020. We also include updated information on cases that were still in progress as of the time of the data collection for the last expansion and update. The purpose of this brief document is to provide a description of this latest litigation data release so that analysts will have one source for technical information regarding the new release rather than having to rely upon three different sources – the original 2017 documentation and two addenda.

Competitive Dynamism in Nascent Markets: Trademarks and Superstar Firm Entry in the Metaverse

Wendy A. Bradley and Julian Kolev
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2023-1
September 2023
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Does entry by a superstar firm change the competitive dynamics of nascent industries? Using USPTO trademark data and a quasi-experimental design, we explore this question by analysing the development of new products and services in the metaverse. We develop a theoretical framework of heterogeneous strategies for market entry under uncertainty, contrasting competition in digital vs. physical industries. Empirically, we show that firm size has a strong positive correlation with metaverse participation among U.S.-based trademarking firms, and that this effect is amplified for born-digital and global, physical-goods firms. However, following Facebook’s entry in 2014, we document a 10% decline in metaverse engagement; decomposing this average effect, larger and born-digital firms were minimally impacted, while globalized physical-goods firms experienced the largest declines. These results suggest that physical-goods firms are much more sensitive to superstar entry than digital-goods firms in nascent markets. Our analysis contributes to the understanding of intangible assets as key drivers of firms’ competitive advantage in the global, digital economy.

Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO

Nicholas A. Pairolero, Andrew A. Toole, Peter-Anthony Pappas, Charles deGrazia and Mike Teodorescu
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2022-1
November 2022
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Women are underrepresented in patenting and the gap is not closing quickly. One major roadblock to progress is a dearth of causal evidence on the potential effectiveness of policies to reduce the gender gap in patenting. Analyzing a randomized control trial at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that was designed to provide additional help to applicants who do not have legal representation, we find heterogeneous causal impacts across gender and technologies on the probability of obtaining patent rights. While both men and women applicants benefited, the probability of obtaining a patent was about 11 percentage points greater for women, and the effects were largest for U.S. inventors, new U.S. inventors, and in technology areas where women had the worst relative outcomes. Our results suggest that a portion of the gender gap in patenting could be eliminated through additional assistance during patent examination.

Immunity to the COVID-19 shock? The case of US innovation, resilience and ingenuity: Global innovation responses to Covid-19

Walter G. Park, Andrew A. Toole, Gerard Torres and Richard D. Miller
Resilience and Ingenuity: Global Innovation Responses to Covid-19
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Innovation in the U.S. economy has displayed remarkable resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. Industries that intensively utilize intellectual property to protect their inventions, brands, and creative works experienced less of a decline in output than other industries. Investments in knowledge, measured by research and development expenditures by companies, exhibited less volatility than investments in physical capital. Demand for intellectual property such as patents and trademarks recovered quickly or grew following the outbreak of the pandemic. In some part, this resiliency is due to the nature of intellectual property. As assets that can be bought and sold in secondary markets, intellectual property provides the opportunity for companies to store value from investments in knowledge and recoup that value when economic conditions recover.

The Miner Act of 2006: Innovating for Safety and Health in U.S. Mining

Andrew A. Toole, James Forman, and Asrat Tesfayesus
Global Challenges for Innovation in Mining Industries
April 2022
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Mineral mining is among the most dangerous jobs in the world. According to the ILO, mining accounted for about 8 percent of the world’s work-related fatalities in 2015 but only represents 1 percent of the global workforce. Despite these dangers, the long-run trend in the USA shows a significant decline in mine-related fatalities. This reflects positive changes in a number of factors, but technological innovations are likely to be one of the most important sources of improvements in health and safety outcomes at US mining operations. This chapter explores technological innovations in mineral mining health and safety, using patent data by describing the broad trends in U.S. mineral mining patents as well as the subgroup related to health and safety. The chapter also provides an overview of the development of U.S. mining legislation culminating with the passage of the U.S. MINER Act of 2006 and describes this program and the patented technological innovations associated with federally supported research through the program. The final section performs descriptive regression analyses to relate the innovations stimulated by the program to health and safety outcomes in mineral mining.

Using Intellectual Property Data to Measure Cross-Border Knowledge Flows

Jake Dubbert, Alexander V. Giczy, Nicholas A. Pairolero, and Andrew A. Toole
Trade in knowledge: Intellectual property, trade and development in a transformed global economy
February 2022
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This chapter surveys the landscape of empirical studies on cross-border trade in knowledge that use intellectual property rights (IPRs) data. Based on a thorough search of the literature, we identify and categorize the types and uses of IPRs data. Our discussion critically evaluates whether these data support the empirical findings in the studies by identifying where IPRs data are particularly useful and where these data have limitations. The final section of the paper discusses the potential value of making greater use of IPRs assignment data. The goal is to provide a reference to help policymakers evaluate the trade in knowledge literature, particularly the interpretation of IPRs-based evidence for policy decisions.

Technical Documentation for Matching Patents and Trademarks to the 2017 National Establishment Time Series Database

Ryan Hughes, Charles deGrazia, and Julian Kolev
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-4
September 2021
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This paper documents the matching procedures used to generate crosswalks between the USPTO’s patent and trademark datasets and the 2017 National Establishment Time Series (NETS) database. The matching procedures implement a combination of entity resolution techniques including name and address standardization, heuristic matching, hierarchical disambiguation, and manual verification. Using these methods, the Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) matched 88% of patents granted and 73% of trademarks from 1990 through 2016 to entities in the NETS database. The resulting crosswalks offer a foundation for a wide range of work to investigate the relationship between intellectual property and firm establishments.

Software Piracy and IP Management Practices: Strategic Responses to Product-Market Imitation

Wendy A. Bradley and Julian Kolev
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-3
August 2021
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How do firms’ IP strategies respond to sudden increases in product-market imitation? Using a 2001 technological shock that enabled rising software piracy, we implement an instrumental-variables estimator to compare a treatment group of at-risk-of-piracy firms with matched not-at-risk control firms. We find that rising piracy increases subsequent R&D spending, copyrights, trademarks, and patents for large, incumbent software firms. Furthermore, copyright and trademark filings precede those of patents, and firms with large patent portfolios disproportionately increase copyrights and trademarks following the shock. We conclude that piracy and similar competitive shocks push firms to innovate to stay ahead of imitator products, and that this effect is moderated by their existing patent portfolios. Our findings have implications for managers seeking to capture value from IP in knowledge-based industries.

Artificial Intelligence Patent Dataset (AIPD) on a blue background with an outline of a head.

Identifying artificial intelligence (AI) invention: A novel AI patent dataset

Alexander V. Giczy, Nicholas A. Pairolero, and Andrew Toole
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-2
June 2021
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To help researchers, policymakers, and the public explore the determinants and impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) invention, OCE released a dataset identifying AI in over 13.2 million USPTO patents and pre-grant publications (PGPubs). The dataset, called the Artificial Intelligence Patent Dataset (AIPD), was constructed using machine learning models for eight AI component technologies. The working paper presents the methodology used and several evaluation metrics based on a manual review by patent examiners with focused expertise in AI, and shows that OCE’s machine learning approach achieves superior performance relative to existing alternatives in the literature.

PatentsView: An open data platform to advance science and technology policy

Andrew Toole, Christina Jones, and Sarvothaman Madhavan
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-1
June 2021
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What are the connections between science and improvements in economic and social outcomes that drive the “value” of science? Most of the time, these connections are circuitous, varied, diffuse, and opaque. Patent data offer an opportunity to expose new connections between science and technology as well as exposing links to downstream economic and social outcomes. The PatentsView open data platform performs data preparation, visualization, and adds helpful features to USPTO’s administrative data. PatentsView is fundamentally a free “intermediate good” that provides the needed materials for researchers, policymakers, and students to conduct their own analyses, make their own linkages, and derive their own insights. This paper provides a quick tour of the PatentsView platform.

Technical Documentation for the 2019 Patent Examination Research Dataset (Patex) Release

Richard Miller
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-4
August 2020
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This new version of the Patent Examination Research Dataset (PatEx) is based on data that the Office of the Chief Economist downloaded from Patent Examination Data System (PEDS) on April 26, 2020. We parsed the XML and organized the data into the familiar PatEx data files, following the organization of the Public PAIR portal. However, there are some minor differences between the new PatEx release and the previous ones. This is the main rationale behind the new technical documentation for this release and we advise users to read the relevant sections to better acclimate themselves to the new data.

U.S. Intellectual Property and Counterfeit Goods—Landscape Review of Existing/Emerging Research

Vega Bharadwaj, Marieke Brock, Bridey Heing, Ramon Miron, and Noor Mukarram
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-3
April 2020
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This report provides an overview of the international market for counterfeit goods. Specifically, the report details the overall magnitude of international counterfeit trade, and explains how counterfeit goods affect the U.S. economy. It highlights the role of the private sector in combatting counterfeits, and the rising trend of counterfeit trade via small parcels. Last, it reviews trends in consumer attitudes towards counterfeit goods, and assesses the facilitating role of social media.

Piracy Landscape Study: Analysis of Existing and Emerging Research Relevant to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Enforcement of Commercial-Scale Piracy

Brett Danaher, Michael D. Smith, and Rahul Telang
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-2
April 2020
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This report provides an overview of the actors involved in the generation and distribution of pirated content, how these actors are organized, and their financial motivations. It further reviews the peer-reviewed academic literature analyzing the harm caused by digital piracy, both to revenue in legal channels and to creative output in the entertainment sector. Finally, it reviews the peer-reviewed academic literature analyzing the effectiveness of both industry- and government-initiated anti-piracy efforts.

The Promise of Machine Learning for Patent Landscaping

Andrew A. Toole, Nicholas Pairolero, James Forman, and Alexander V. Giczy
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-1
March 2020
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Patent landscaping involves the identification of patents in a specific technology area to understand the business, economic, and policy implications of technological change. Traditionally, patent landscapes were constructed using keyword and classification queries, a labor-intensive process that produced results limited to the scope of the query. In this paper, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using machine learning to produce patent landscapes. Machine learning leverages traditional queries to construct the data necessary to train the machine learning models, and the models allow the resultant landscapes to extend more broadly into areas of technology not expected a priori. The models, however, are “black boxes” that limit transparency into their underlying reasoning. To illustrate these points, we summarize two landscapes we recently conducted, one in mineral mining and another in artificial intelligence.

Previous working papers

2017-2019

USPTO Patent Number and Case Code File Dataset Documentation

David L. Schwartz, Ted M. Sichelman, and Richard Miller
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2019-5
December 2019
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Researchers studying the U.S. patent litigation system have typically had to rely on proprietary, commercial databases to retrieve comprehensive lists of litigated patents and associated case information, precluding publication of underlying data and the verification of study results. In other situations, researchers have used incomplete datasets, potentially resulting in biased results. In order to overcome these limitations, the authors and their research teams reviewed every available initial complaint and related documents in roughly 99 percent of all patent cases filed in U.S. district courts between 2003 and 2016 in order to generate a comprehensive list of litigated patents in those cases. In addition, the authors and their teams coded the case “type” for all of these actions, such as infringement, declaratory judgment, false marking, ownership dispute, malpractice, among others. The resulting dataset can be downloaded in bulk and be used and reproduced with no licensing restrictions. These data have been married to USPTO’s Patent Litigation Docket Reports Dataset, which provides full case and docket information for every one of these cases. Thus, for the first time, researchers can now use a single, comprehensive dataset of patents, case types, and related case information to conduct empirical studies of patent litigation in the U.S. district courts.

Innovation Activities and Business Cycles: Are Trademarks a Leading Indicator?

Charles A.W. deGrazia, Amanda Myers, and Andrew Toole
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2019-4
June 2019
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Despite the widespread use of economic information to anticipate changes in business conditions, innovation metrics are not considered to be leading indicators. We argue that aggregate trademark data reflect firm-level choices that can help predict business cycles. In addition to establishing the conceptual basis for considering trademarks, our statistical evaluations, using turning point analysis and a novel machine learning method, find that trademark filings for product and service offerings in commercial use outperform many of the conventional leading indicators. Our work suggests that including trademark metrics in composite indexes could improve recession forecasting performance.

Shorter Patent Pendency Without Sacrificing Quality: The Use of Examiner's Amendments at the USPTO

Charles A.W. deGrazia, Nicholas A. Pairolero, and Mike H.M. Teodorescu
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2019-3
June 2019
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Prior research argues that USPTO first-action allowance rates increase with examiner seniority and experience, suggesting lower patent quality. However, we show that the increased use of examiner's amendments account for this prior empirical finding. Further, the mechanism reduces patent pendency by up to fifty percent while having no impact on patent quality, and therefore likely benefits innovators and firms. Our analysis suggests that the policy prescriptions in the literature regarding modifying examiner time allocations should be reconsidered. In particular, rather than re-configuring time allocations for every examination promotion level, researchers and stakeholders should focus on the variation in outcomes between junior and senior examiners and on increasing training for examiner's amendment use as a solution for patent grant delay.

Using Intellectual Property Data to Measure Cross-border Knowledge Flows

Jake Dubbert, Alexander V. Giczy, Nicholas A. Pairolero, and Andrew A. Toole
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2019-2
March 2019
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This paper surveys the landscape of empirical studies on cross-border trade in knowledge that use IPRs data. Based on a thorough search of the literature, we identify and categorize the types and uses of IPRs data. Our discussion critically evaluates whether these data support the empirical findings in the studies by identifying where IPRs data are particularly useful and where these data have limitations. The final section of the paper discusses the potential value of making greater use of IPRs assignment data. The goal is to provide a reference to help policymakers evaluate the trade in knowledge literature, particularly the interpretation of IPRs-based evidence for policy decisions.

The Miner Act of 2006: Innovating for Safety and Health in U.S. Mining

Andrew A. Toole, James Forman, and Asrat Tesfayesus
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2019-1
January 2019
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The working paper uses patent data to explore the levels and trends in technological innovations in U.S. mineral mining with a particular focus on safety and health. We present four types of patent-based evidence on the impact of the 2006 MINER Act. While this evidence does not include a randomized or natural experiment to establish causality, all four types of evidence point to a positive and significant effect of the MINER Act on patenting in safety-related mineral mining technologies as well as reduced injuries and lost workdays among mine workers.

An Anatomy of U.S. Firms Seeking Trademark Registration
Emin M. Dinlersoz, Nathan Goldschlag, Amanda Myers, and Nikolas Zolas
May 2018
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Embracing Invention Similarity for the Measurement of Vertically Overlapping Claims
Charles deGrazia, Jesse Frumkin, and Nicholas Pairolero
April 2018
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USPTO Patent Prosecution Research Data: Unlocking Office Action Traits
Qiang Lu, Amanda F. Myers, and Scott Beliveau
August 2017
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USPTO Patent Prosecution and Examiner Performance Appraisal
Alan C. Marco, Andrew A. Toole, Richard Miller, and Jesse Frumkin
June 2017
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Patent Examination Quality and Litigation: Is There a Link?
Alan C. Marco and Richard Miller
June 2017
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Individual versus Institutional Ownership of University-Discovered Inventions
Dirk Czarnitzki, Thorsten Doherr, Katrin Hussinger, Paula Schliessler, and Andrew A. Toole
June 2017
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Patent Litigation Data from US District Court Electronic Records (1963-2015)
Alan C. Marco, Asrat Tesfayesus, and Andrew A. Toole
March 2017
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The Law and Economics of Concealing Health and Safety Information
Daniel E. Ingberman and Asrat Tesfayesus
January 2017
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2013-2016

Patent Claims and Patent Scope
Alan C. Marco, Joshua D. Sarnoff, and Charles deGrazia
October 2016
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Liberalization Agreements in the GATT/WTO and the Terms-of-trade Externality Theory: Evidence from Three Developing Countries
Asrat Tesfayesus
June 2016
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Knowledge Creates Markets: The Influence of Entrepreneurial Support and Patent Rights on Academic Entrepreneurship
Dirk Czarnitzki, Thorsten Doherr, Katrin Hussinger, Paula Schliessler, and Andrew A. Toole
April 2016
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The Dynamic Relationship between Investments in Brand Equity and Firm Profitability: Evidence using Trademark Registrations
Dirk Crass, Dirk Czarnitzki, and Andrew A. Toole
January 2016
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The Bright Side of Patents
Joan Farre-Mensa, Deepak Hegde, and Alexander Ljungqvist
December 2015
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The USPTO Patent Examination Research Dataset: A Window on the Process of Patent Examination
Stuart Graham, Alan C. Marco, and Richard Miller
November 2015
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Business Dynamics of Innovating Firms: Linking U.S. Patents with Administrative Data on Workers and Firms
Stuart Graham, Cheryl Grim, Tariqul Islam, Alan C. Marco, and Javier Miranda
July 2015
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The USPTO Patent Assignment Dataset: Descriptions and Analysis
Alan Marco, Stuart Graham, Amanda F. Myers, Paul D’Agostino, and Kirsten Apple
June 2015
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The USPTO Historical Patent Data Files: Two Centuries of Innovation
Alan Marco, Michael Carley, Steven Jackson, and Amanda F. Myers
June 2015
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The USPTO Trademark Assignment Dataset: Descriptions and Insights
Stuart Graham, Alan Marco, Amanda F. Myers, and Kirsten Apple
April 2014
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Perspectives on the growth in Chinese patent applications to the USPTO
Alan Marco, Richard Miller and Jay Kesan
February 2014
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What is the Probability of Receiving a US Patent?
Michael Carley, Deepak Hegde and Alan Marco
December 2013
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What is behind the growth in trademark filings? An analysis of United States data
Amanda F. Myers
October 2013
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