THE ROLE OF FEES IN PATENT SYSTEMS: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inelastic good. Studies in the latter group provide grounds for both low and high application (or pre‐grant) fees and renewal (or post‐grant) fees, depending on the structural context and policy objectives. The paper also presents new stylized facts on patent fees of 30 patent offices worldwide. It is shown that application fees are generally lower than renewal fees, and renewal fees increase more than proportionally with patent age.     

账户操纵——文献回顾及关于概念框架的设想

公司操纵账户的做法由来已久。此类行为在研究文献中常被提及，并被赋予各种名称，如盈余管理、利润平滑化、除垢会计、创造性会计和账户粉饰等。本文将对相关文献做一个综合性回顾，并就账户操纵问题提出一个概念性框架。     

Capital structure and international debt shifting

This paper presents a model of a multinational firm's optimal debt policy that incorporates international taxation factors. The model yields the prediction that a multinational firm's indebtedness in a country depends on a weighted average of national tax rates and differences between national and foreign tax rates. These differences matter as multinationals have an incentive to shift debt to high-tax countries. The predictions of the model are tested using a novel firm-level dataset for European multinationals and their subsidiaries, combined with newly collected data on the international tax treatment of dividend and interest streams. Our empirical results show that a foreign subsidiary's capital structure reflects local corporate tax rates as well as tax rate differences vis-à-vis the parent firm and other foreign subsidiaries, although the overall economic effect of taxes on leverage appears to be small. Ignoring the international debt shifting arising from differences in national tax rates would understate the impact of national taxes on debt policies by about 25%.     

Hysteresis in CEMAC Informal Employment

Journal of Quantitative Economics - In this empirical study we investigate the hysteresis in informal employment rate for six central African countries for the period 1981–2012. We use a more...     

Per un pugno di dollari: a first look at the price elasticity of patents

This paper analyses the role of patent-filing fees requestedby the member states of the European Patent Convention (EPC).We provide first empirical evidence showing that the fee elasticityof the demand for priority applications is negative and significant.Given the strong variation in absolute fees and in fees percapita across countries, this result indicates a suboptimaltreatment of inventors across European countries and suggeststhat fees should be considered as an integral part of an intellectualproperty policy, especially in the current context of worryingbacklogs. In addition, we show that the transfer rate of domesticpriority filings to the European Patent Office (EPO) increaseswith the duration of membership to the EPO and the GDP per capitaof a country, suggesting that member states experience a learningcurve within the EPC. The high heterogeneity in the transferrates casts some doubts on the practice that consists in relyingon filings at the EPO or at the United States Patent and TrademarkOffice to assess the innovative performance of countries.     

Verfall oder Wandlung des Kapitalismus

Ohne ZusammenfassungAus dem Französischen übersetzt von Dr. A. Kozlik, Wien